It’s been a long time coming, but PlanetSide 2’s “biggest update since 2016” is live today, and it introduces the game’s first new faction, Nanite System Operatives, and finalizes the game’s transition to DirectX 11, which should herald significant performance improvements across the board.

As you may recall from the faction’s initial previews late last year, the Nanite Systems Operatives faction isn’t technically its own faction but rather a “mercenary” faction whose forces will fight under the banner of the least-populated faction in a given zone, which should help to balance out faction population disparities and ensure that battles don’t get too one-sided. The update also marks PS2’s transition from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11. This update should “significantly boost FPS performance on modern hardware,” and the devs say it also provides them “a path for further optimization in the future.”

And now that that monumental undertaking is out of the way, the PS2 team is looking toward the future, and the next goal appears to be a revamp of the new-player experience. Although the devs aren’t delving into specifics just yet, they do mention that they’re looking into automatically pairing low-BR players into Mentor squads to allow them to reap the benefits of personal tutelage from experienced players. As for what the devs have planned beyond that, we’ll just have to wait and see, but if you want to read a bit more about this latest update and the team’s future plans, you can check out the full producer’s letter over on the game’s official site.