If you had joined much later than a friend of yours, there may not be room on his world instance anymore and you have to join another parallel one and so cannot play together. One thing I don’t like about most MMO structures is the fragmentation of the player base between these “shards”. For a persistent multiplayer world like WoW the solution is to split up the player base into more manageable groups called “shards”, which are a permanent instance of the universe that look after a certain amount of players. But in all cases there are always more players than any one server instance can handle. For a game with complex physics and a fully destructible terrain, like Battlefield 3 the number of players that can active in an instance is less than a game with less real time fidelity like WoW, or Eve on Line. This number is usually inversely proportional to the amount of data that needs to go between the client and the server. I also was really impressed with how Demon’s Souls merged the single player experience with the multiplayer side.Īll of this helped form my thinking on how Star Citizen is going to balance the difficult balancing act between multiplayer and single player.Īll multiplayer games – whether they are a persistent world massively multiplayer game ( MMO) like World of Warcraft or just an online multiplayer game like Battlefield 3 – have a limit to the number of players that can be active in anyone area or level. With Star Citizen I was determined to combine what I wanted to achieve with Freelancer, with the personal experience that I think both Wing Commander and Privateer were so strong with.īut me being me, I wanted to combine things I like about the promise of a MMO, but avoid the aspects that I’m not so keen on like splintered player groups, griefing and grinding. I didn’t get a chance to deliver this vision and ultimately while Freelancer was a good game, it fell short of what I was aiming for. My original vision for Freelancer was to first release a single player game and then follow it up with massively multiplayer version with a dynamic economy and a world that reacted and adapted to the players actions.

When I started building Freelancer, partly inspired by the work done on Ultima Online (which was in development when I was still at Origin), the fun I was having playing multiplayer games like Command & Conquer and Diablo I had wanted to bring the Privateer experience into the bold new world of multiplayer. One of my goals with Star Citizen was to create a huge open world that you could adventure in solo, with your friends, mingling with NPCs and other real people.įreelancer was built to have up to 128 players in multiplayer, but as a few of you know that was more a theoretical maximum than something that was really practical, especially back in 2003. I’ve given some answers but as it keeps coming up, I thought it would be good to give all of you a longer description in how this all works and fits together.

I get a lot of questions about how the whole persistent universe works and what I mean when I talk about battle instances.

It takes two single player