Mah brain asplode from all da co-op...
It is a question that will be debated until the end of time: just how many players is the ideal when it comes to co-op games? Eight? Four? According to Infinity Ward, it's just two (yeah right). If you ask Microsoft, they are thinking a wee bit bigger. Like, many orders of magnitude bigger.
300,000
Don't believe us? A recent Microsoft job posting mentions qualifications including "building a backend capable of hosting a 300,000 player game in real-time". Almost a third of a million people, all playing at the same time? It's almost unimaginable. Our minds are blown just thinking about it!
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who are you agreeing with?
And I thought MAG was going to be a lot for a console game...
Personally I think that playing Coop is enough with 8-16 players, but 4 is the minimum, ideal number. 4 so I can play with some of my friends, and when more of them have time then we could play together with 8-16 players.
Maybe work contributing towards APBs transfer to consoles?
have you ever played an MMO? there are many servers, not just one, and depending on the architecture, they may work together on one environment, or they might each have their own environment. when maintenance is needed they normally don't pull all the servers at once. they can load balance with a smaller set of servers while maintenance is done on the few servers that are down and the impact is pretty small. they might lower the player limit for a while or something to make up for the lost processing power. of course some MMOs just take everything down for a few hours once a month to do maintenance. there are a lot of factors but when it comes down to it, downtime is pretty minimal.
however, if M$'s annual 24-hour XBL maintenance is any indication of how they'll operate an MMO, it could be pretty scary. although XBL is an entirely different creature.
roland is right. It's got to be an MMO or something like 1 vs 100.
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i've actually been a bit bummed lately because i'll be playing something (game w/ 4p co-op) w/ my wife and 2 brothers (4 total) and someone else will want to play... then co-op options fall off a cliff and we're forced to play something competitive. i wish some of these newer games would push the envelope and give us a few more slots at least. especially since my 3rd brother might be getting a 360 soon.