Too many cooks?

How much is too much? How big is too big? Can some things ever be big enough? Apparently not, if you believe the 247 emails in my spam folder, or Insomniac Games, makers of the Ratchet and Clank and Resistance: Fall of Man games.

I read recently on a Playstation blog that the upcoming Resistance: Fall of Man 2 will support 60 player multiplayer, and I found this shocking. From a technical point of view, it’s shockingly impressive, but it got me thinking – do we really want to play with that many people at once? I’m not actually sure that I have 60 friends in real life, let alone on Xbox Live or Playstation Network!

Obviously, for some games a large amount of players works very well; Warhawk on the PS3 works extremely well with 32 players as the maps are very big, allowing you the space to battle on the ground or in the air all across them. However, this is a case where the Playstation 3’s lack of an included-in-the-box headset works out well, as you don’t have to hear too many idiots chattering/arguing/singing away.

On the Xbox side, I heard today that Frontlines: Fuel of War also allows a massive 50 players in an online game, although I’ve yet to personally experience what 50 people with microphones in one game must sound like!

What worries me about any large multiplayer game is what I call the online gaming world’s DQ (Dick Quotient). I’d currently estimate that in the average 16 player game there is at least one dick , which means that you could have as many as five of them in one 60 player game. And as everyone who has ever played online knows, dicks wind each other up a huge amount, and thus the annoyance they cause to everyone else multiplies up exponentially. Hence two dicks in a room is not twice as annoying as one dick in a room, but four times as annoying. That means with five dicks in a room, it would be thirty-two times as annoying as just one. That’s an annoyance factor roughly equivalent to coming home to find your wife in bed with your best friend just as a crackhead steals and then crashes your brand new sports car. In other words, it’s pretty damned annoying.

Most of my favourite online gaming moments have been playing team games in Call of Duty 4 with 5-7 people that I actually know well and like, and I’m not sure adding another 22 to that team would really have helped the experience! But then perhaps I’m just an old fart who is set in his ways, and all da kids are down wid this, with their social networks, social gaming, socially getting pissed up on strong cider down the park…

Maybe I should add that I’ve never played World of Warcraft or any of these other MMORPGs as I don’t much like RPGs (unless we’re talking Rocket Propelled Grenades) so I don’t know how these compare to Xbox Live or Playstation Network. I’d love to hear in the comments an estimated DQ for those type of games…

Also, any suggestions on how to rid the gaming world of all the dicks would be greatly appreciated. Personally I say we should take off and nuke them from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.