PlanetSide 2

PlanetSide 2 is a first-person shooter with no matches to queue into. Three empires — the Terran Republic, the New Conglomerate and the Vanu Sovereignty, plus the robotic NSO mercenaries — fight for control of the planet Auraxis in a war that never stops: bases change hands while you sleep, and the map you logged out of yesterday is not the one you log into today.

Scale is the whole point. Hundreds of players inside one battle, six classes, ground and air vehicles, player-built bases out in the open, and outfits (its version of guilds) running assaults with dozens of people. Taking a continent can take hours, and it takes organized players rather than lone snipers.

There is no entry fee: the game downloads free on PC and PS4, and every class, continent and vehicle is there from day one. What takes time are the weapons, optics and upgrades, unlocked with certifications earned by playing or bought outright with Daybreak Cash, the premium currency.

The rest of the store is cosmetic: camo, helmets, armor, vehicle trails, with deals rotating almost every week. The All Access subscription runs about USD 14.99 a month, drops near 10 on the annual plan, covers Daybreak's other games too, and adds 50% more experience, 48 daily certifications, 500 Daybreak Cash a month and login queue priority. It speeds you up; it does not unlock anything walled off.

It is still live and patched every month, on a small scale. The November 2025 patch reworked the Infiltrator class, and the 2026 patches have gone almost entirely into server stability, client crashes and the return of the small Koltyr map, reopened in its own pool for off-peak hours. The official forums closed in March 2026 after a hardware failure, and the community moved to Discord.

Population is the weak spot: Steam counts a few hundred concurrent players, and recent reviews sit at Mixed (53% positive) against a Very Positive lifetime score. Development moved from Daybreak to Toadman in 2024 and went back up in the air when EG7 shut Toadman down in January 2025; Daybreak said the game's team was unchanged, without saying for how long. There is no current public roadmap.

If you want battles with hundreds of players and a front line that moves while you are logged off, there is no direct replacement: more than a decade on, nothing else does exactly this. If you want short matches, balanced matchmaking or a full server at any hour of the day, this is not it. It is free, so trying it on Steam costs you a download.