- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Interesting artical, but unsure if its really that true. Most of how well a game and how many players a game can support comes down to how a server is set up, and mostly down to how much bandwidth you give it. Yes its possibe to get a game going with 16 players on Halo, and the like...and as the artical says theres games coming out with 150-200 players in it. That to be honest isn't really that impressive when looking at old MMOG technology you get 5k-500k people playing. Its all down to server bandwidth and hardware. I believe MS themselves set a record recently in Eve where they had over 7500 players together at once. Thats quite some going for the server load, but in games like that with 56k modem users its hard to accomplish it without severly limiting the amount of data being sent...you couldnt do that with a game like Halo2 due to the shear amount of data flying around for jumps, vectors of each round flying armour, damage to vehicles etc. If you make a simple game you can, but if its that simple will anyone really play it?
MMOG's (games like SWG, Eve, Planetside etc) are alot more simple in how they send data around....alot are almost turn based or timed severely. Which on a game like Halo wouldn't work due to the need of alot of data being moved around and very quickly, so having hundreds of people just isnt economic. Nice if it could be, but realistically its not going to happen short of us all having T3s at home and running a server off the back of a OOC3. I do long for the day when a MMOG could handle that kind of data, and speed and gameplay like Halo and other FPS, but currently technology is lacking sadly. If you do do it, you have to make compromises sadly, so games which will be playing with 200 users in a FPS will have to be quiet limited in what they do to things like scenery, fragging people, and bullet tracking.