PlanetSide 2 breaks its own Guinness World Record for most players online in a single battle

Fans of the massively multiplayer online (MMO) first-person shooter (FPS) PlanetSide 2 this weekend became a part of gaming history - again. That's because they broke the Guinness World Record for Most Players Online in a single FPS battle, a record previously also held by the PlanetSide 2.

The previous record was set back in 2015, when 1,158 players simultaneously took part in one gigantic battle on the Hossin continent, between all three of the game’s Empires: Terran Republic, Vanu Sovereignty and New Conglomerate.

The thing is, that time the event was officially organised by the game creators Planetsidebattles, and publishers, Sony Online Entertainment, and it was an actual attempt to broke the previous record of 999 players, made by Man vs. Machine, back in 2012.

• Read more: Steam breaks another record with more than 22 million concurrent users.

But this time around, everything is completely spontaneous. The game saw a big surge of players in the last few months and was even amongst Steam top sellers at one moment.  This March the game peaked at 7,694 concurrent players, with the average being around ~3,700.

New Guinness World Record was set this weekend, as reported by Andy Sites, executive producer of PlanetSide franchise. In his tweet, he mentioned Youtuber and streamer The Spiffing Brit, who was the part of the game when the record was made.

The game recently got a big update called Escalation, which surely is one of the reasons for the growing number of players. Still, as it usually is the case this last few weeks with the gaming records - a big part of it is also due to coronavirus and the worldwide quarantine.