Daybreak Game Company, the developers behind the Planetside Series and H1Z1, announced back in December of 2018 that they would be putting forth a new addition to the Planetside series with Planetside: Arena. This was planned to be a massive multiplayer FPS style game. It had two game modes that were official: a 150 player battle royale for either solo players or teams of three, and a mode called Massive Clash which was a 250v250 player battleground. That’s a lot of players per side on one battleground.

More modes were announced to be in the making, such as deathmatch, capture the flag, and other types. The game is meant to be huge, supporting up to 1000 players in a match, which is far beyond what sometimes seems possible. And it was set to be released for January 29, 2019.

However, Daybreak Game Company needed more time to test, this time asking for their fanbase to help them. In a recent blog post over on the Daybreak website, the developing team announced that they needed a lot more time and a lot more testing for some of the features that they’re trying to work into Planetside: Arena. They decided that they needed the time to “supplement our feature set, fully optimize engine performance, and improve server infrastructure was absolutely necessary to deliver the quality, polished game the PlanetSide community deserves.”

But Daybreak Game Company wanted to make sure that their dedicated fanbase would stick around through the delay. They’re achieving this by allowing anyone who pre-ordered to have free access to a Battle Pass for the Founders Season. This Battle Pass will have exclusive bonuses as well, but only available to those who pre-ordered it.

Now, for the rest of those who were waiting for the game to come out, Daybreak Game Company decided to have a Closed Beta for those with keys to be a part of the playtesting. Those who pre-ordered the game will have a key that they can use to be a part of the Closed Beta or people can sign-up to maybe get a key in the future without having to pre-order.

After all of this, Daybreak hopes to have Planetside: Arena out by March 26, 2019, in polished and working condition.