Much Different? More like Much Potemkin Village.

It’s a world record people.  Most concurrent players in an online FPS ever.  And I was on the scene.  Fifty years from now when I’m appearing before awestruck school assemblies to tell the harrowing true story of my war, I’ll get a little misty-eyed as I gaze into the distance and say, “you can’t know what it was like unless you were there.  I was there, man.”  But I hope the kids won’t ask for any details.

Man vs. Machine was hands down the worst online FPS I’ve ever played.  I’m going to describe it to you in the past tense because I think it safe to assume this game will never be played again.  There were two teams, one with huge, easy to shoot models and one with tiny, hard to shoot models.  Team Tiny Guys, with the easy aiming task, had grenade launchers.  Team Huge Guys, with the difficult aiming task, had sniper rifles.  Which did much less damage than the grenade launchers.  The balance of forces became obvious early in the event and thenceforth there were several hundred more Tiny Guys than Huge Guys.  Combined with the fact that the spawns were within line of sight and shooting range of each other, this meant the game was little more than sadistically lopsided spawn camping.

But all that’s incidental—Much Different meant to demonstrate their server’s capacity, not their grasp of game design.  And, terrible as it was, the game felt very responsive.  I observed none of the lag I expected from such a populous scrum.  Does this mean Much Different’s technical wizards have banished the bugbear of online gaming?  

I’m skeptical.  After the record was officiated the server was reset in a vain attempt to balance the teams.  At that point everyone else in my war froze in place, yet I was able to keep running and gunning.  Each enemy I shot to pieces responded with a death animation and I continued to receive notifications of my successful kills.  This leads me to suspect the game’s responsiveness was an illusion created by provisionally resolving some player actions on the client side, allowing the server to update the game’s state at its leisure and ignore the likely overwhelming stream of client updates as needed.  Such a strategy would indeed allow a server to support many more than a few dozen simultaneous players, but only by having each play a different game.  That wouldn't pass unnoticed in an FPS worth playing.