One of the new additions has been VoiceIP support and we got a demo of that at the PlanetSide press event. Anyone with a microphone will now be able to give voice orders to his or her squad as well as listen to what other squad members have to say. To have this system in place out of the box when the final game is released should be a welcome addition for players who are tired of punching keyboards for text chat. Another recent addition allows for hacking and capturing a building only when it is linked to a based that your empire currently owns. As Sony Online producer Dave Georgeson mentions in his latest producers letter on the official PlanetSide web site, this has generated actual war fronts on the various continents.

The beta testers have been giving lots of details suggestions to the development team on ways to improve the game, according to what Georgeson told HomeLAN at the PlanetSide press event. The team has been going over those suggestions and putting those that they like into the beta. Updates to the game are already planned after the launch of PlanetSide. Georgeson said they already have a schedule of free content and patch updates that stretches into October so far. We hope one of them is for improved graphics; our biggest complaint about the game is that it still has the same look that it did when the first screenshots of the game came out over two years ago and doesn’t compare to the look of the current crop of first person shooters