Daybreak Games, the developers behind the Planetside series of games have confirmed that they intend for Planetside 3 to be released, considering Planetside Arena, the battle royale game currently in Early access, to be a "stepping stone" to the next major game in the series, which will be bigger than Planetside 2.

The company stated in an official blog post that the third game will be expanding beyond Auraxis and will centre on a "full-fledged galactic war" with various empires looking to explore and colonize each other. 

Planetside Arena will apparently serve more than just a development stepping stone, as the game will link the stories of Planetside 2 and 3 together, and serve as a testing ground for new features and gameplay modes that may make it to Planetside 3.

Daybreak have suffered various staff layoffs this past week, which you would have assumed would have an impact on future development. While there's no mention of this in the aforementioned blog post, executive producer Andy Sites did state on Twitter that the team are "still committed to continuing support and development" of Planetside.

Indeed, somewhat conflictingly, the blog post states that the team is recruiting "several additional programmers, designers and artists" - which is odd if several such staff have just recently been laid off.

Sites also confirmed in the blog post that Planetside Arena would get additional modes that are more akin to traditional Planetside gameplay, albiet in shorter session-based matches, presumably this is where a lot of the feature testing and story linkup will take place.