The places will contain "pockets of terraforming" that players open up in undiscovered areas of map. Current idea is that planet has toxic atmosphere; you must build terraformers to open up pockets where you can mine freely.
You then support it as it goes back to a processing facility to get its resources.
I am going of topic now, but having a whole planet would make things more interesting to me.
So then the aim of that game will not be to control the planet, get it back? That was supposed to be the aim in firefall, but there is nothing like that, to the exception of few missions.
I don't care if the planet or planets are procedurally generated, I would be fine with one rather than several maps. To give time to the devs to engineer the planet, only a portion of it could be accessible before releasing the rest (continent?).
To my opinion, the devs should look big. We know it's possible to generate planets, even though it could be made much smaller than earth. Then have exploration missions to go activate shields to open "pockets of terraforming", this would require to craft stuff to reactivate or to build the place to open the world. I personally think that the stuff should be built by the gamers, and they should be rewarded for doing such things (maybe simply called commender of the base and stats about how many things he built, commanded, etc). Then there would be people specialising in engineering/construction while others more on the fighting, etc. Then like it was supposed to be for firefall, having some bad guys (like aliens putting that gas to convert the planet? then we would cure it...) or wild life attacking these positions, to end up with a very dynamic environment. That way, the controlled area will be proportional to the amount of players and difficulty. In firefall, there are supposed to be attacks and places taken, but it rarely happens, and there are too few and too many people to actually end up loosing them. They endded up putting the interesting things in missions that separates you from the crowd, and that people do 100 times to get some stupid weapons... Some places could be harder to get, either because of stronger bad guys or wild life, but certainly not to an extend that requires levelling! The places will have different resources and will have to be controlled to be able to harvest from there. These things should also rely more on grouping of gamers to perform the tasks in the openworld than some stupid missions out of the crowd.
Anyway, this is just a small part of what I wished see from firefall, and having "small" maps makes it much less interesting. I don't mind scarifying a bit of graphics quality over a much bigger environment. And bigger environment is important for richer experience which should not be super repetitive like firefall... I just hate doing the same thing all over again, doing the same mission just to get xp or for collecting some stupid objects... I just want to feel I am doing something useful in the game.
We might see different planets, but only a small chunk of each of them will be avaiable for us, and this chunks will probably be smaller than 100 square miles.
