Quantity has a quality of its own, but, in the context of player caps in multiplayer first-person shooters, there are limits.
The announcement that Battlefield 2042 would have 128 player servers was met with excitement by many, but almost immediately after release, opinions soured.
This is not to say no one liked the vast increase in player count, nor that it couldn’t have been implemented better. But there are fundamental issues with player counts beyond 64 (the standard cap for ‘large’ multiplayer games) that are not easy for developers to mitigate.
The main issue with an exceptionally high player count is the increased number of players who feel their contribution to the team doesn’t matter.
Killing an enemy in a small server will have more of an impact on the tide of battle than killing an enemy in a big server. In small servers, a single enemy can account for a sizeable chunk of the enemy’s forces. The death of one enemy may thus often decide the outcome of a battle. But in big servers, the death of a single enemy will rarely register in the grand scheme of things. There are far more enemies where the guy you just killed comes from, after all.
Likewise, when you die in a small server, your loss will likely be sorely felt (unless you’re trash), whereas if you die in a big server, it rarely matters to anyone, regardless of what side they’re on.
Some level of insignificance can be a good thing. Games like the Battlefield games pre-2042 intentionally make players feel insignificant. Some players like to feel like a common grunt on a much larger battlefield, a regular person who cannot dictate the outcomes of battles on their own and can only contribute to the team in a small way. It feels authentic; you’re a common soldier, not a superhero.
But intentional insignificance can be taken too far. People can only be made to feel so insignificant before they start wondering why they should even bother.
The number of players a match would need to induce this sense of futility is different for everyone. If we imagine a server’s player numbers steadily increasing from one to, let’s say, a million, a skilled player would feel like a significant member of their team for a lot longer than an unskilled player would. The unskilled player may start to feel like they don’t matter around the 50-player mark or so, whereas the skilled player may feel they matter to the team until there are about 80 players on the server.
It’s true that players don’t always care about the big picture and sometimes just want to get kills or mess around or enjoy the carnage of huge numbers of players clashing into each other. This is why maps like Metro are so popular; sometimes, people don’t care about winning or tactics – they just want lots of explosions and a mass of targets to shoot into.
If you’re in the right mood, it’s possible to have just as much fun in a 12-player match as in a 64-player match as in a 1000-player match as in a 1,000,000-player match.
But for players who like a little strategy in their games and who are conscious of their role as a member of a team in pursuit of an objective (even if that objective is as simple as ‘kill more dudes than the other team before the timer runs out), it can be demoralising to realise that nothing they do matters.
For people who care about that sort of thing, a balance must be struck between significance and insignificance regarding the player’s sense of worth to their team, or at least their potential worth if they were to ‘git gud’.
64-player servers seem to strike that balance for most people, judging by the fact that a 64-player cap has been the standard for large-scale multiplayer FPSs for so long. Judging by many of the negative responses to Battlefield 2042 that I’ve read, a 128-player cap seems to instil too great a sense of insignificance in people. It’s ironic, then, that in a game where players’ actions are made to be so insignificant, DICE tried to make players feel special by replacing the standard class system with a cast of obnoxious operators.
Planetside 2 mitigated the problem of insignificance by dividing each server of 2000 players between different regions. Each region was effectively its own map, allowing players to focus only on winning the area they were fighting in.
This created problems of its own, though, namely that some regions were underpopulated while others were too chaotic, and regions are often overwhelmingly dominated by one side or the other, so the problem of insignificance still remains. (I’d also hazard to say that having such a massive number of players spread so widely across such a vast map is ultimately pointless and that smaller servers playing on smaller maps would not only solve the issue of sparsity and overpopulation but the lesser technical demands of smaller player counts would allow for technical improvement in other areas.)
In regions where these issues don’t exist, though, players can achieve a decent level of control over the tide of battle in that region, even while in the larger battle, they are still as insignificant as a pebble thrown against the tide.
For this reason, I don’t see 64-player caps falling out of favour for big multiplayer FPSs anytime soon.