- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Its not graphical lag which is a problem, its bandwidth. There is going to be alot going on in MP. Notice how in the demo's that every black burn mark made by a weapon on the scenery stayed. Also notice all the debris thats littered around. Not sure if when you frag someone the bits are staying, but its also a possible. All these things cause both graphical lag, and also more importantly will need to be told the exact locations to all the players. This is the big thing, that going to amount to alot of data. Now, on Live theres only depending on your connection about 256k upstream, which split 16 ways is 16k/sec per player. Now compared even to a game like PGR2 which only has damage modeled to the cars and black marks on the road, thats using 22k/sec per player to upstream. Bungie are doing alot more with alot less bandwidth available. Add in a slight bit of lag due to a useless ISP and you have a real mess, so it cant really use even that full 16k if its going to run smooth due to different qualitys of connection.
If we all had a T1 or a T3 its not an issue, on DSL it is. As for EA and BF its alot simpler an engine. If you really want lots of people you really are going to have to use dedicated servers, not Live style hosting by one person, played by everyone else. 16 users online, and 32 in LAN is fine. If I have to turn the game into something that resembles Doom1 for complexity to have more users than its something I can do without. Although....
Although....if MS as a XBox Live premium service ran a few servers, maybe like is done for Unreal and for Half Life on the PC, where people pay an additional $5-$10 a month for the use of a server that they then use to run games for there Clan or even public fights that there Clan challenge from, then I would pay it happily to get the faster server, and also possibly allow the full 32 players to play online...but thats just an idea.