The Just Cause 2 multiplayer project is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my 28 years playing video games. Here is a massive sandbox game that shipped without multiplayer of any kind, and which now has some that is redefining the very term “massively multiplayer” with up to 1800 people on the same, single map (that measures in at around 400 square miles).
What’s even more impressive than the scale of the project, though, is the manpower behind it. The creators of Just Cause 2 Multiplayer are…two guys from Australia. That’s it. Foote, the programmer, and Jaxm, the gameplay designer.
Foote says the project’s creation has so far taken around 700 hours, most of that spent reverse-engineering Just Cause 2’s engine to see how everything fit together. Now that it’s been cracked (for the most part), tens of thousands of gamers have been testing it out over the past few months.
Ready for possibly the craziest part of all? The current ceiling of 1800 concurrent players are all handled on a single server. And that single server shows no signs of giving up any time soon, with the pair “yet to reach any real barrier or limitation preventing us from reaching an even higher player count than the previous public tests.”
You can see now, maybe, why when people say it’s a project that could reshape the way the industry approaches multiplayer gaming, they’re not joking.
Just Cause 2 Multiplayer: Behind the scenes with gaming’s greatest hack [Red Bull]
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