Video games are hard. You know that, but it isn’t ever really clear how hard from the other side of the screen, and that’s why seemingly simple requests like “let players do X” can often require a lot of additional design work and effort. A new video from the New World team featuring game director Scott Lane, creative director Dave Verfaillie, and lead engineer Scott Geiser explains why some seemingly simple and straightforward features are actually much harder than they seem.
For an example,to start with, Geiser explains why the game doesn’t just allow 30,000 players on every server, which is a question with multiple answers. The game’s combat relies on a solid interplay of upload and download speeds for communication, and having 30,000 people on a server massively increases the amount of data going by every second. Moreover, the game doesn’t instances its gathering nodes, so it would lead to far more resource competition. And if you’re thinking “well, just instance the gathering nodes,” that’s… kind of the point. These things are easier to think of than they are to implement. You can check out the full video below.
