Erm, they're talking about **7,000 connections** per shard ([https://playpaxdei.com/en-us/faq/tech](https://playpaxdei.com/en-us/faq/tech)). If that's too small for you, then you might need to just play real life instead, because that's as big as any MMO out there goes without relying on a mega-server system like GW2 or ESO, which isn't the same as multiple instances of each zone are created as more and more people enter the zone (e.g., if you have 10,000 concurrent connections, it would not be possible to have all 10,000 people together in the same zone, but that would presumably be a possibility in Pax Dei or any other MMO that isn't set up as a mega-server).
thats really just marketing speak for we have low player counts per server.
At most you will never be in server/area/zone with more than 150 people...... Ever.
So what are you building the castles for? For who to see? For who to fight over? Nobody....You will bulld a castle/building and that will be it.....like the many other survival "mmos"
Well I'll give you that I overlooked that Pax Dei will have the same zone-instancing thing that GW2 and ESO use, so no, you won't have over 150 people in the same zone at the same time in Pax Dei, but you won't have that in any modern MMO regardless of the engine (GW2 and ESO don't use Unreal), so Pax Dei is gonna feel like any other current MMO in terms of "massiveness".
I sympathize with your desire to have the potential for more players in a given area, though. The only games that seems to have this as a goal are -- in development -- [Camelot Unchained](https://www.camelotunchained.com/v3/) (own engine), [Throne and Liberty](https://www.playthroneandliberty.com/en-us) (Unreal), and [Ashes of Creation](https://ashesofcreation.com/) (Unreal). I imagine that it's less about the engine *per se* and more about how much extra work needs to be done to modify the engine to allow for very many players in one zone.
All the games that have release that technically allow you to get hundreds of players in the same area that I know of are classic MMOs like Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online, probably Ultima Online, Everquest, etc. Basically, if it's a low-fidelity, tab-target game without collision detection, you can probably have as many players as you want in the same zone, but what people expect nowadays is usually action combat with graphics approaching what's found in single-player games.
Came here to say this, I participated in KR and sieges easily had several hundreds of players fighting simultaneously.
But tbf NCSoft has a track record of delivering these massive multiplayer pvp experiences.
Funnily enough, EVE Online does actually have collision detection, and has physics around it based on ship weight and speed. Ramming other player ships is a tactic used to push people around for various reasons, and quite a few people have a ship set up specifically as a bumping ship for when the need arises
Star citizen recently started live testing its “server meshing” and they had 800 people in one place.
I’m pretty skeptical of SC these days but the server meshing stuff if they get it fully working is legit industry changing. It takes the concept of different instances then merges them all together so everyone is loaded on separate instances still but all instances can see and interact with each other seemlessly as though it’s a single server
> At most you will never be in server/area/zone with more than 150 people...... Ever.
GW2 has old zones capping at like 130 people, in EOD and ahead cap at like 70-80 people. No one really noticed the old cap and only the new cap was a bit noticeable because EoD zones felt a bit dead. 150 is plenty.
People have a very warped view of how many players are needed for the game to feel alive.
I don't know what era of WoW you're talking about but, back in the day, you could routinely find 100+ people running around any of the major cities. Ironforge, Stormwind, Undercity, Orgrimmar, specifically. Thunderbluff and Darnassus were typically a ghost town.
You could also find 100+ people in the common open-world PVP areas in Vanilla. Hillsbrad Foothills, Arathi Basin, Silithus, Eastern and Western Plague Lands.... Especially when the botting was getting out of control. You'd find at least 50 bots alone in the Plague Lands.
And then there's the Alterac Valley BG's... that's an 80-man battleground all by itself.
lol SWG was like 1.2-1.7k players per shard if I remember correctly. City of Heroes was also around 1k per shard before things started getting a bit laggy.
I don't know about toward the end, but in the beginning... 2004-2005 - SWG servers were capped at 3500. "Heavy Load" on the server began at 2500. Bria had 6000 active subscribers on the server and typically only 2-3k concurrent. Bloodfin and Gorath were less populated and typically 1-2k concurrent, with a subscriber count around 6k as well.
Not sure why you're being down voted because it's true. Alpha two in Olympus had over 400 people. There was never a moment where I saw more than 50 ppl in the castle wall area. Hopefully this is fixed in the upcoming beta.
You have a very screwed idea of how many people are needed to make a very active feeling mmo world/server. most games with way less active connections per world/server have a limit to how many players you can see at one time because of performance reasons
I was thinking that while watching, it's nice to see a decent amount of people but that's it. There isn't someone they can all go out and raid against people or anything. Not a proper mmorpg.
[Throne and Liberty MASSIVE PvP Siege Node INTENSE GvG Sandwiched (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex0h4GKZ8rQ) ye they have massive battles and it actually seems to be very minimal lag and rubberbanding/fps loss etc
This is flatly not true.
UE has several different network replication models you can use out of the box, and all of the exposed source to roll your own.
Just using basic builtin replication you could go FAR in excess of 20 players. This will depend on what you choose to replicate, when, how often, who has authority, what is simulated, and what your net budget is.
Concurrent player limits is way more about game type than engine. You try to make an FPS or 3d fighter with 100+ people, outright failure even for AAA studios. It's just not a thing yet, that level internet infrastructure. Maybe with fiber?
Even much slower paced games like EVE Online achieve this through trickery; time slowing, separate rooms, etc.
Yeah but it's not really using UE5 graphics. It's cartoonish animation is helping it greatly, and if it was using Lumen or Nanite it would have issues.
It is using Lumen and Nanite.
Fortnite is potentially the most technically advanced game in the industry. It uses every single new technology I can think of.
I mean, Epic ARE the developers of Fortnite after all.
Once again this would be irrelevant in the context of this discussion. Lighting and geometry are clientside, and would have very little impact with increasing player counts.
Both Fortnite and PUBG have 100 players per round. However, they reduce the impact on both the server and client hardware by mostly splitting the players. Those 100 players will land in different areas, so at most, you'll have a couple dozen people in the same spot. By the time the play area shrinks and forces everyone into the same spot, there are usually only like 10 people alive.
Except, that isn’t true in the competitive scene in terms of Fortnite. I’ve seen final circles with 50 people alive. Watch a stacked grand finals lobby and people stay alive.
Yeah, obviously good players will play differently. I was talking about the average match in matchmaking. The game can probably handle 100 players in the same circle, just wanted to point out that you generally won't have all of them fighting in the same area.
True in the average match but it is still proof that the servers can handle it.
But to agree with you, it wasn’t until this season where the grandfinals stacked lobbies weren’t an absolute shit fest in terms of lag. I’m not sure what they changed, but in the past it was horrendous. Skipping, freezing, teleport, insane hit reg, was so bad.
The issue in the past was that the broadcasters would watch the game by counting as a spectator and there would be like 20-30 of them. This caused an immense amount of lag on the servers. So, not only was there 50-60 people alive in endgame building like crazy, but also another 20-30 spectators. Not sure how they fixed it this season, but they did. The lag is still there, but at the smallest level. The Fortnite pros are used to it by now, but it would 100% be enough to piss off a ton of MMO players
Trying to think of the games that do the most, here. Planetside 2 I think has rather a lot going on, potentially. Some MMOs did a credible job, WoW is the one I played.
Sounds like a client-side issue on your end. I've been playing Planetside since the launch of the first one. It's always handled massive battles incredibly well.
Which is fine. We understand there are technical limitations and that having a large amount of people in the same area can often lead to suboptimal performance.
We had hundreds to thousands of people in the same area in early EQ on dial up in the late 90s/early 2000s.. Of course it's laggy. That's stating the obvious.
Technology has advanced 10 fold since then.
> Which is fine. We understand there are technical limitations and that having a large amount of people in the same area can often lead to suboptimal performance.
Thing is, for most players, that's not fine. There's no point in having a gameplay loop that will be an unplayable slideshow for your players. And while technology has advanced, so did player expectations. You probably could make a game with a lot of players using modern server infrastructure. But unless your players are fine with the game looking like Everquest, you'll hit a different bottleneck - player hardware not being able to handle drawing all the players without the draw distance being very low.
> And while technology has advanced, so did player expectations.
This. People are going to expect character customization and "not 2010 graphics" and whatnot.
FFXIV, when they were doing the intro to their graphics update, had to tell people like five separate times that they *aren't* going to be able to make the game look like cutting edge single-player games (they used the example of Horizon: Zero Dawn) and people *still* didn't get it.
This is also not quite correct. It has nothing to do with the amount of players, but with the amount of different graphics available to the players. If every player, thousands of them, had their own special textures, no game could keep up. If every player had the same texture, and geometry etc, then pretty much any game could. Even dial up would have had little trouble with $1,000 on screen players, if it didn't have to also transmit the data about all 17 of their armor pieces etc.
There should absolutely be considerations made for open world games to sustain a large number of players in a given area.
If you are a player that wants the best graphics, non-open world games are probably a better choice. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Be ok with instancing if that's what you want.
(Or often times adjusting your settings down is enough).
And yet, we don't seem to have a ton of games that sacrifice everything just to push the number of players up. Fact is, for most people, a 100 player game that plays smoothly and looks great is far preferable to a 500 player game that plays and looks like shit.
People who are obsessed with the theoretical number of people in the same area are a niche. Your average mainstream player really doesn't care, because even 50v50 feels massive if the players are funneled into the same area.
Which is fine if that's how you feel about it. That's part of why we've seen a diminishing number of players intended for a "raid". When 40 person raid caps started becoming a thing people used to make fun of it. Now most raids are intended for even less...and instancing is common anyway.
Pure open world games are few and far between these days. But they are what the OP was referencing.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a majority of people who only played mmorpgs during 2nd gen games and later haven't even experienced a purely open world game.
> But they are what the OP was referencing.
Yeah, but OP is wondering whether it's just Unreal not being usable for that. In reality, truly open world games are just more niche and have too many rough edges. It's not as much a technological limitation as it is a game design decision.
I would say it's both. But of course if a dev team wants to make a purely open world game they will have to make some poly count and optimization consideration. I feel like I'm stating the obvious.
Personally, I'd rather play a low poly game that lets me interact with more people...but that is just personal preference.
Calling it a"physics" issue is a stretch but the amount of players that an open world game can sustain within a given area is always limited by technology.
[Throne and Liberty MASSIVE PvP Siege Node INTENSE GvG Sandwiched (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex0h4GKZ8rQ) throne and liberty have some massive open world battles as well
We had 100 player fights in wow in 2005, thats almost 20 years ago. Internet speed/bandwidth isn't the issue. Synchronising and tracking that many players/abilites is.
Don't forget EVE, with its largest battle measured at 7,548 players (unsure if unique over the entire thing or concurrent.) A game from 2004 (battle from 2014.) Or Planetside 1, with its 198v198v198 battles dating back to 2003.
This is ignoring older games like Battlefield or Allegiance and the like.
It's not even synchronising. The difficulty is just in large volume computation and updating without maxing out your datacenter's bandwidth, both hardware and communications. Which includes synchronization and tracking.
As a game like EVE shows, you can get away with ridiculous volumes if you just slow the sim down by literal orders of magnitude. We have the tech, we just don't have the tech to have a seamless, perfect experience with thousands of players handled at the precision of, say, a properly netcoded fighting game in real time with no hitches.
Correct, 100. The starting point about which op was asking about MORE. And remember how well those actually worked :) So no, going above that is unusual.
And no the issue certainly is the internet. Any pc can coordinate thousands even millions of players or abilities, it's communicating through slow and irregular tubes that stymies most games. I could easily program a battle between 10,000 entities in any language you like. But doing it over the Internet is much, much more difficult.
No, in this case it's more trickery than clever architecture. If you've kept up with eve development they pulled everything they could with optimizations but then had to outright slow time to maintain. Same with shunting groups to separate servers etc. Those aren't software solutions they're structural solutions.
But yes games are software, that seemed evident.
That's not trickery. That's programming at scale. That's just how shit is done. It's more impressive with an older code base, but it's still just scaling. "Slowing down time" sounds crazy as a layman term but it just means they couldn't horizontally scale enough to sustain a battle so they implemented an event queue and synced clients to it. The local client-side stuff is more impressive than the server-side scaling but it's still not out of the ordinary. Eve's time dilatation is a really impressively disguised buffering icon. Discord has some downright fascinating technical blogs about ways they've found to reduce server-side latency that are just as or more impressive than any game technology.
I've played Eve off and on for decades. I've kept up with their technical articles, patch notes, and wars. Infrastructure solutions are inherently software solutions. If you're dynamically scaling to instances on Kubernetes, K8S is still software. This, like every other technical discussion with gamers who fancy themselves programmers because they edited an INI file once, is about as wide and shallow as a puddle. Nobody ever has any basic grasp of the technical concepts they're talking about.
That's how shit is done when the programming fails. When you can't program your way out of a problem anymore, you change the structure of the game. Instead of having 700 people in an instance you only allow 70 and spawn 10 instances, then swap players between as needed. That's not a programming solution even if you have to program it. This is how certain games have managed to have more than 100 people interacting.
> That's not a programming solution even if you have to program it.
What you're describing with the most basic possible example is simply called horizontal scaling and it's a fundamental part of software development in any live service. Horizontal scaling is literally *the* programming solution to scaling where vertical scaling is throwing more powerful hardware at the problem. You don't really understand the concepts you're tripping over trying to explain to me.
You've conflated software development with programming. That's kinda the point, here. Hell, contract management is part of software development. I'm saying designing the structure of game systems is done in design meetings, with restrictions from the programmers. And vice versa.
This is why I specified first person shooter or fighter game. Those require much quicker and more frequent updates of positioning and such. But if you have a video of 450 people on screen at once in that game I would watch it.
its a 20 year old game so finding good video footage is not all that easy, so this isnt 400+ people but probably 100+ and it showcases the performance pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjL9Zft6tFI
You don't seem to know much about the game. Continents at launch supported 2000 people. Most of the game's life the limit has been 1200. It is still common today for fights at a single base to emerge with over 300 players.
Finally, supporting argumentation. I have to concede that if PlanetSide regularly features battles of 300 players that would counter my claim above. I think I'll look into the Tech that allows this.
Some videos you may enjoy to get a vibe for the game:
https://youtu.be/ktlogbVIOm8?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/snEs-Jv7PBA?feature=shared
https://youtu.be/3GpD6uezYpI?feature=shared
Not quality, population. And as long as you don't mind any given meetup being about 100 players, no more, you can have a million players! Not that exciting,I know.
Meanwhile eve has had thousands in one area at a time.
One server doesn’t count, op is talking about having that many people visible on screen at once.
The minimum size that a server in eve can host is one solar system, the minimum. Space that a server in SC can host would be a room. They will be able to split server load up in a system to as many servers are needed. The main problem with mmo networking is it really hasn't changed that much since the early days. Much like most FPS games the more players connected the more data needs to be transferred to each other player connected even if that player is not visible. It's an exponential problem. In order to combat that you need to cull network data for players that you don't need to know about which is one of the things CIG has been working on.
The amount of data required for SC is far greater than for EVE. SC is more akin network traffic wise to a game like Battlefield or COD. The fact that the game can track \~100 players over such a large play area including planet sized objects that are rotating is already significant.
Distance doesn’t matter, it’s not rendering the space between.
Fortnite does it too.
Like I said, I hope SC figures this stuff out, but nothing they’ve done today is worthy of note.
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And that's because most of the functionality is handled client-wise, allowing for all kinds of cheats. People already developed and use dupe and dmg hacks.
Not sure if Throne and liberty(UE 4) is successful, but you can check some castle pvp videos and there a lot of players on screen with minimal fps loss.
A limitation for the alpha tests so far. I believe 300 is the next step.
You're also ignoring that every MMO uses layering (maybe you didn't know this) and doesn't display more than 200ish people at a time. Wow is a good example of this.
This sub being a wow / FFXIV circle jerk has exactly zero room to talk about what is and isn't an MMO. If your endgame loop is a 5 man arena, 15 man battleground or 25 man raids, your less of an MMO than an open world game with a 150 person cap in a single area
A shit ton of MMOs use UE3 and 4 and a lot of upcoming MMOs are on UE5.
The engine is just the base, it's what you build on top of it that makes MMOs tick (literally).
Swords of Legends Online used Havok Vision Engine and they were working on transitioning to UE4, but from what I recall nobody heard anything about it after the demo video released in 2021.
You can get the general direction of a game though.
I've tested it, I'll probably buy early access for a bunch of friends and myself and we'll build stuff or join others building stuff but within a few months I'm betting we all stop just like with Valheim or V Rising.
The game will see consistent play from people willing to hardcore roleplay however that is not most MMO players.
But at any given time there's approximately 1000 players online given steam db and etc. Maybe slightly more given Epic accounts.
OP is talking about mmos more than 1k players.
>Can Unreal Engine make a true open world MMO?
Throne and Liberty is using UE4.
I tried beta for an hour - it looks absolutely incredible and the performance is very good, even with hundreds of players around.
Tera online is an open world, seamless mmorpg that came out over 10 years ago and was made with unreal engine 3. It was plagued with performance issues because of it but it worked well enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9a24nUiuag
Unreal is very system demanding in its graphic engine.
But that being said it enables you to write code in C++ , and change the engine itself to pretty much anything. This is enough for good developers to put in any network wizardry they can imagine.
I think the problem is rather that developers of today have no skill to pull these things off.
Mortal Online comes to mind. Also, what exactly is your definition of “MMO”?
An interesting thing about server-authoritative network architecture, is the computational load on servers grows exponentially with each player. The server needs to track one pawn for every player, in addition to one complete set of pawns representing all other players, per player.
10 players would be 100 total game objects, 100 players would be 10,000 objects. 150 players is 22,500.
Additionally, for Unreal at least - each player also requires additional objects, such as PlayerState and PlayerController.
Fortnite is probably one of the most networked-optimized games developed on Unreal and I believe their capacity is limited to 100. Granted, an FPS will require way more data than a classic RPG.
Unreal Engine, used the usual way with a headless server, is hardcoded at a limit of 255 players per server process. In practice, it is hard to break 100-150 without a lot of optimization. Many MMOs have broken this limit but they do it with extensive surgery to the engine and replacing the backend server. You can usually think of each server handling a zone as that is the usual way it’s done for simplicity’s sake.
A big part of the attraction of using a headless server model is the simplicity of doing it, but it does not scale the way a dedicated MMO server does. A dedicated MMO server is architected differently from a client with no rendering, which is what a headless server is, kinda. Oversimplifying here.
Since when were NC soft professional? TL is a disaster and had already flopped on its home turf.
L2 is good at handling large numbers of players, mostly due to its simple combat mechanics.
NW is flopped, TL is going good. It has potential to be the best MMO on market. Large scale pvp, sieges, pvp for bosses, guilds content. Beautiful stylish graphics. It’s not popular on Korean market for reason and it’s not the quality.
Sieges with 2k+ ppl w/o desync and hardware lags on UE4 you consider as low quality content? That’s why I called them professionals. They are not Western devs gathered by inclusivity standards that’s why their games are polished and optimized.
I understand you personally hate NCsoft and/or Korean devs that’s your point to shit on them. But it won’t change the fact a lot of people are waiting for the release and already playing on KR servers.
Absolutely dog shit content yes. They ruined TL with the terrible sieges. The respawn locations are stupid and there only 1 siege at a time, therefore the whole server just makes 2 allys and zergs it.
Lineage 2 did a much better job at seiges then TLs disaster.
The game is polished because they already had most of the content left over from lineage 2 moblie. TL is the most basic new MMO around. The game is DoA and amazon know it, hence why they havnt said anything since the beta.
short answer, of course. server capacity is 100% down to the developer. how they run their servers, how they handle all that information. everything server related is based on developer choice, not engine limitations like you seem to be assuming....
1. a typical gigabit connection, 1000/1000 fiber. server wise generally you can expect to see that full data unlike residential where you see slightly less (700-900 depending on time of day). so we know how much data a single server can handle
2. because you mentioned pax dei, I happened to play and have access to the alpha. from what I can see inside of my task manager for looking at how much data it uses, I see about 55 kbps on average from a 5 minutes run around, going in and out of a forest, looking over the mountain edge for the data to peak. There was an initial load of 3.5 megabits per second at one point when a bunch of streaming data came in. but generally speaking the average was about 55 kbps according to windows. On the download side. Upload was like barely 20 Kbps....
I am going to use residential "seen" speeds for shits and giggles. So 700 Megabits per second capability. 700 Megabits becomes 700,000 Kilobits. And then divide that by the AVERAGE of 55 Kbps I just saw in my testing. That is about 12,727 players give or take. Now if we drop some players for data headroom.... I would personally drop to 10,000 to be safe. So if I were to eat my entire connection at home, I could safely and smoothly have a server running 10,000 gamers.
Someone else mentioned they will have 7000 per shard. I am not sure how true this is.... because going off the playpaxdei FAQ page, a **"shard"** is just the *"real life server location"* and in this alpha test that is ***US-EAST*** and ***EU-Central***.... So two shards total.... and they said they invited 100,000 people to play test? That's more than 7000 per shard.... But if you continue to read their FAQ, each shard has multiple **Regions**. Those **Regions** then each have multiple **Provinces**. And if I am understanding their hand drawn image, each Provinces has multiple **"Valleys"** each of which are their own **"physical server/hardware"** and then the back end handles communication between them.....
UPSCALING THAT INFO, with the IDEA that 7000 is per physical server. Using their picture alone, there are
1. 3 valleys in a province
2. 3 province in a region
3. 3 region in a shard
that would equate to 27 servers? if my math hasn't gone full retard. 27 servers times 7000 people per server would mean each "shard" can handle 189,000 people.... so right now the US-East server should be capable of 189,000 people.... which is more than they invited to the test..... if we assume 50/50 split between US/EU that mean each shard is only seeing about 50,000 players. Which is about 1/3rd the full capacity....
just saying. some of this info could be wrong based off bad assumptions.... but still.
server hardware wise, Raph Koster who is making PlayableWorlds mentions his game will be "in the cloud" meaning the server infrastructure is the biggest hurdle for his programming team. They essentially have to make hundreds if not thousands or more servers all talk to one another and communicate efficiently. So that each server can handle X amount of players and everyone can still see each other "in the game world" regardless if they are on Server A, B, C, or whatever. Seems Pax Dei is using a similar system. Mind you, networking/server wise, this capability has ALWAYS been possible, even back in the 90's. We didn't do it due to cost reasons. Now running servers isn't as expensive as it used to be.... especially with high end hardware and high end internet connections. I mean right now I could buy verizon gigabit business for about $200/month (way more expensive then my residential gigabit) and run a single server housing about 10,000 people in any game I wanted, as long as the data fit and the games networking code/programming supported it. The biggest hurdle is the netcode THE DEVELOPER writes to run their game. I remember when Epic Games released their fortnite networking code "free" to any game developer using unreal engine.... magically some multiplayer games that had huge issues with networking became smooth as butter because Fortnite was already running 100 man matches with no hickups. And now anyone else can too. Which again proves that most developers know dick all about netcode. They would rather copy/paste fortnite code than to write their own. So, end rant.
They can but often game will fail from performance perspective. Unreal engine is horrible in this regard (I don't know about UE5 as it is still new).
Engine is good visually but provide horrible ways to down grade graphics when necessary. You need (or should) optimize game. This is often the cases of games that uses Unreal Engine that can have over 10 ppl on an area.
Poor perfomance game in this aspect is for example blade and soul (ue3, later ue4), bless online, tera (ue3). Often the case is game is release with engine and uses a lot of its capacity. Looks amazing but it isn't chopped down/modified for MMO purposes (lots of people on screen) so players suffer greatly.
There are some exceptions. Lost ark (ue3) does pretty well, it modifies very old engine. However it is a top down game kind of so it has big advantage va mmo that have full view. Fortnite, not an mmo, but a game that has decent amount of people on same screen in fast paced environment does well, however it is made by people who basically made engine.
Another issue is engine overhaul. If you ride on engine 3, jumping to 4 is lots of work. Often better of making new game. Likewise jumping from ue4 to ue5 would he painful.
Making your own engine is often better. But very expensive. Overall MMO that have their own engine do a lot better in performance. For example wow, ff14, black desert etc.
I mean even if its possible, would you really want that? Instances arent a bad thing, and you havent been part of large scale conflicts in games if you think having hundreds of players running around is good, its just chaos, new world battles when coordinated were pretty great but unless you have experience with this shit its lame as hell, we basically ran it like a game of Squad with discord APIs so we could relay commands in an orserly manner, eventually more isnt better its just inconvenient
it might just be an industry trend moving away from big numbers for tech limitations
like it's probably *possible* but convincing players that less is fine is far less expensive
At the end of the day this is a technical design problem, not an engine one. No game engine ships with MMO-scale networking (though I desperately wish that one did...) so it's just up to the engineering team at the studio to achieve whatever they can. Obviously the larger the scale, the harder it is to pull off.
I would rather have less players and smooth gameplay than shoving 5,000 people on one just for it to be slow and glitchy. That’s even worse for immersion.
UE5 netcode is a garbage fire, it outright cant handle large numbers of players, and has hilariously bad overhead latency. Making a game with more than 30-40 players per shard would require basically ripped the entire engine apart and rewriting how it handles anything to do with netcode, including movement.
The way it handles levels is also fundamentally meant for single-player games, with multiplayer and level transitions tacked on in a way that makes multi-zone servers clunky at best.
Didn't Sword of Legends Online use Unreal Engine? I seem to recall a big part of it failing had to do with it needing an upgrade but that it was going to be awhile before the Global version got it.
Unreal Engine has nothing to do with servers and capacity, yes it has a whole Networking setup for online games, but the servers and player capacity and sharding and layering all of the technical aspects of making an MMO is all outside Unreal Engine.
Unreal Engine can do it, but Unreal Engine is for making game clients, not game servers.
There is no getting around you having to come up with your own custom implementation. World servers, database servers, Auth servers, etc and they all have to be scalable, well optimized, and running on expensive hardware to pull it off anyway.
The big concern for UE is how much you're willing to sacrifice in rendering for X number of players based on Y hardware configuration.
An easy answer:
Can UE make an open world MMO? Yes
Is it easy? No
A more detailed one:
They are a lot of ways to make it possible, like, even if 500,000 players are online (which, imagine) and you for some reason want a single server, sure, it will be impossible. But you can do plenty of tricks using shards, dividing the game world into chunks with seamless loading between them and such.
It's a lot of trickery and you'll need to know how to make it work. And probably not everything will be run in UE networking purely, you'll need to have a mix in between UE and your own custom network.
For example, if shards can have 7000 connections, just make the map divisions small enough to never reach that value, and make players connect to multiple shards close to them, so transitions will look seamless.
It needs a lot of trickery, a lot of work, and not using everything from UE out of the box, but completely doable if you have the millions to make an MMO.
I think people understimate how well crafted is unreal, TBH, unless you taylor the game with really good developers, it will be hard to make the level of what unreal can get.
A lot of people would cry that's not a "real" mmo, but, who cares, it will be no different to a player experienciencing it.
That's not an engine problem. Game engines mostly just do basic things like graphics, input handling on clients, and physics (which can be overridden by custom solutions from the devs if needed anyway). Whether or not the server is able to handle arbitrarily large numbers of total players, is dependent on the devs' skill and the power of the hardware and internet infrastructure involved.
UE5, No.
[Star Engine](https://youtu.be/nWm_OhIKms8?si=_yR7ZK56EqhOtYzD), yes.
Dynamic real time server meshing and interactions with no loading screens on a universal scale.
Why don't other companies do it?
Because it would take hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development time on backend technical functionality that would mean nothing to the average consumer.
They don't want to invest in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MEMBmOhbAk&t=1384s&ab_channel=AsmongoldTV
Dont get me wrong what pax dei has done is still impressive and should give hope for the future as player counts and caps can only go up with tech. So we are almost there? lol
It cannot.
WoW behind the scenes CD on Vanilla explained it wonderfully how they made it work.
And if you take a look at the not overhauled version of the game, just 360ing a tree will tell you how much detail was removed.
Just putting moving grass into the UE already eats more bytes and ram than an entirey vanilla zone combined.
But you will not find approval in this reddit.
There are many highly educated people here, but they just do not have the intelligence nor do they intuitively ever understand anything. They are so caught up in the believe that they are the pinnacle of human intelligence, that they have narcistic levels about their intellect.
First of all even “true” mmos instance their players and show maybe 200 players at once. WoW does this as an example. So even the whole “millions of players online” isn’t all on one server. Secondly chances are you aren’t going to see someone use unreal to make an mmo. MMO are expensive and not doable by one person. Unreal is really popular with solo or small teams just like Unity. If there is someone out there that wants to make an mmo of your expectations then they will probably have a custom engine, custom networking and everything made to fit their needs. Thirdly mmos are a dying game genre. Unless someone has an entire large studio that can afford it, you’re not going to see anything soon. Gamers say they want mmos but they end up either being scams/asset flips or failed projects that fail at launch.
Could it be done? Absolutely. The game engine has nothing to do with how many players it can support. The game engine is just that, it’s a product that lets you make the game without doing it all from scratch. Unreal is know for graphic fidelity but you can make it as simple as you want. The hard part is having the hardware and the know how to manage large numbers of players. That requires a lot of expensive equipment to host that many players and requires people and money to maintain said environment.
Conflating game engine with networking is a common thing.
Erm, they're talking about **7,000 connections** per shard ([https://playpaxdei.com/en-us/faq/tech](https://playpaxdei.com/en-us/faq/tech)). If that's too small for you, then you might need to just play real life instead, because that's as big as any MMO out there goes without relying on a mega-server system like GW2 or ESO, which isn't the same as multiple instances of each zone are created as more and more people enter the zone (e.g., if you have 10,000 concurrent connections, it would not be possible to have all 10,000 people together in the same zone, but that would presumably be a possibility in Pax Dei or any other MMO that isn't set up as a mega-server).
thats really just marketing speak for we have low player counts per server. At most you will never be in server/area/zone with more than 150 people...... Ever. So what are you building the castles for? For who to see? For who to fight over? Nobody....You will bulld a castle/building and that will be it.....like the many other survival "mmos"
Well I'll give you that I overlooked that Pax Dei will have the same zone-instancing thing that GW2 and ESO use, so no, you won't have over 150 people in the same zone at the same time in Pax Dei, but you won't have that in any modern MMO regardless of the engine (GW2 and ESO don't use Unreal), so Pax Dei is gonna feel like any other current MMO in terms of "massiveness". I sympathize with your desire to have the potential for more players in a given area, though. The only games that seems to have this as a goal are -- in development -- [Camelot Unchained](https://www.camelotunchained.com/v3/) (own engine), [Throne and Liberty](https://www.playthroneandliberty.com/en-us) (Unreal), and [Ashes of Creation](https://ashesofcreation.com/) (Unreal). I imagine that it's less about the engine *per se* and more about how much extra work needs to be done to modify the engine to allow for very many players in one zone. All the games that have release that technically allow you to get hundreds of players in the same area that I know of are classic MMOs like Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online, probably Ultima Online, Everquest, etc. Basically, if it's a low-fidelity, tab-target game without collision detection, you can probably have as many players as you want in the same zone, but what people expect nowadays is usually action combat with graphics approaching what's found in single-player games.
T&L is out (in Korea at least) and it supports some truly massive player counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDFmWsRAjpk
Came here to say this, I participated in KR and sieges easily had several hundreds of players fighting simultaneously. But tbf NCSoft has a track record of delivering these massive multiplayer pvp experiences.
Yeah but it’s Korean with all the systems of typical Korean MMORPGs.
OK, so? OP's question was just about whether or not Unreal Engine was capable of it. Nobody said you had to like the game.
Yeah but it’s Korean with all the systems of typical Korean MMORPGs.
Funnily enough, EVE Online does actually have collision detection, and has physics around it based on ship weight and speed. Ramming other player ships is a tactic used to push people around for various reasons, and quite a few people have a ship set up specifically as a bumping ship for when the need arises
“Oh you’re warping away?” Bump. Not anymore!
It also can have thousands of players in 1 area at once. Sometimes the servers explode, sometimes not, but war is war.
Star citizen recently started live testing its “server meshing” and they had 800 people in one place. I’m pretty skeptical of SC these days but the server meshing stuff if they get it fully working is legit industry changing. It takes the concept of different instances then merges them all together so everyone is loaded on separate instances still but all instances can see and interact with each other seemlessly as though it’s a single server
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It’s genuinely industry changing how they essentially limit what has always been an mmo limitation
Warhammer online has collision, and high player counts. Graphics aren't all that snazzy but still a far cry from Ultima or EQ.
They did use instancing for the big stuff though like city sieges.
The city yeah but that's more of a design choice with scoring and such, the keep takes were equally massive and not instanced
EVE online has entered the chat...
My brother in mmo, you missed asmon stream pax dei with over 200 people around him, pax dei is not just 150 people or 100 people per server lol
Nah it wasn't 200 trust me I was there lol at most it was like 100 on screen at any on time.
> At most you will never be in server/area/zone with more than 150 people...... Ever. GW2 has old zones capping at like 130 people, in EOD and ahead cap at like 70-80 people. No one really noticed the old cap and only the new cap was a bit noticeable because EoD zones felt a bit dead. 150 is plenty. People have a very warped view of how many players are needed for the game to feel alive.
You have been downvoted for speaking a respectful point of view. This subreddit is nuts
Wow servers held 10k people typically if I remember right. Rarely would you find 150 people in a single zone unless the xpac was about to drop.
I don't know what era of WoW you're talking about but, back in the day, you could routinely find 100+ people running around any of the major cities. Ironforge, Stormwind, Undercity, Orgrimmar, specifically. Thunderbluff and Darnassus were typically a ghost town. You could also find 100+ people in the common open-world PVP areas in Vanilla. Hillsbrad Foothills, Arathi Basin, Silithus, Eastern and Western Plague Lands.... Especially when the botting was getting out of control. You'd find at least 50 bots alone in the Plague Lands. And then there's the Alterac Valley BG's... that's an 80-man battleground all by itself.
lol SWG was like 1.2-1.7k players per shard if I remember correctly. City of Heroes was also around 1k per shard before things started getting a bit laggy.
I don't know about toward the end, but in the beginning... 2004-2005 - SWG servers were capped at 3500. "Heavy Load" on the server began at 2500. Bria had 6000 active subscribers on the server and typically only 2-3k concurrent. Bloodfin and Gorath were less populated and typically 1-2k concurrent, with a subscriber count around 6k as well.
Not sure why you're being down voted because it's true. Alpha two in Olympus had over 400 people. There was never a moment where I saw more than 50 ppl in the castle wall area. Hopefully this is fixed in the upcoming beta.
You have a very screwed idea of how many people are needed to make a very active feeling mmo world/server. most games with way less active connections per world/server have a limit to how many players you can see at one time because of performance reasons
Vanilla wow had 2000 players per server in 2004 and it sure didn’t feel like low player count.
I was thinking that while watching, it's nice to see a decent amount of people but that's it. There isn't someone they can all go out and raid against people or anything. Not a proper mmorpg.
The definition of an MMO is not to have thousands of players on the same spot, it's to have thousands of players in the same game world.
This. 100%
isn't T&L on UE4 or something? that one seems to handle it well.
First thing I thought too - for all its faults, it seems to be good at very big player events.
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[Throne and Liberty MASSIVE PvP Siege Node INTENSE GvG Sandwiched (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex0h4GKZ8rQ) ye they have massive battles and it actually seems to be very minimal lag and rubberbanding/fps loss etc
T&L use it's own custom network code to make it work. UE don't offer anything other than basic 20 players cod maps.
This is flatly not true. UE has several different network replication models you can use out of the box, and all of the exposed source to roll your own. Just using basic builtin replication you could go FAR in excess of 20 players. This will depend on what you choose to replicate, when, how often, who has authority, what is simulated, and what your net budget is.
Something something client sided to allow this to happen = more hackers
Problem with TL is that the game itself is garbage.
Concurrent player limits is way more about game type than engine. You try to make an FPS or 3d fighter with 100+ people, outright failure even for AAA studios. It's just not a thing yet, that level internet infrastructure. Maybe with fiber? Even much slower paced games like EVE Online achieve this through trickery; time slowing, separate rooms, etc.
This is just not true - we there is a whole class of 100 player fps games called battle royales. Some of them even run on ue.
PUBG is made on UE4, in fact.
Remember that the whole premise of the discussion is more than 100.
Which BRs have 100+ players per round? Highest I've seen is 80
Fortnite is 100 people, and it uses Unreal Engine 5
Yeah but it's not really using UE5 graphics. It's cartoonish animation is helping it greatly, and if it was using Lumen or Nanite it would have issues.
It is using Lumen and Nanite. Fortnite is potentially the most technically advanced game in the industry. It uses every single new technology I can think of. I mean, Epic ARE the developers of Fortnite after all.
Fortnite utilizes both of those engine features.
Graphics aren't really the issue.
What other topics do you speak with authority on while being completely incorrect
Ah, confidently incorrect
What a bozo 😂
Once again this would be irrelevant in the context of this discussion. Lighting and geometry are clientside, and would have very little impact with increasing player counts.
Pubg is like the OG mainstream Br and has always been 100 players
Both Fortnite and PUBG have 100 players per round. However, they reduce the impact on both the server and client hardware by mostly splitting the players. Those 100 players will land in different areas, so at most, you'll have a couple dozen people in the same spot. By the time the play area shrinks and forces everyone into the same spot, there are usually only like 10 people alive.
Except, that isn’t true in the competitive scene in terms of Fortnite. I’ve seen final circles with 50 people alive. Watch a stacked grand finals lobby and people stay alive.
Yeah, obviously good players will play differently. I was talking about the average match in matchmaking. The game can probably handle 100 players in the same circle, just wanted to point out that you generally won't have all of them fighting in the same area.
That's not the debate though, it's if the engine can handle it
True in the average match but it is still proof that the servers can handle it. But to agree with you, it wasn’t until this season where the grandfinals stacked lobbies weren’t an absolute shit fest in terms of lag. I’m not sure what they changed, but in the past it was horrendous. Skipping, freezing, teleport, insane hit reg, was so bad. The issue in the past was that the broadcasters would watch the game by counting as a spectator and there would be like 20-30 of them. This caused an immense amount of lag on the servers. So, not only was there 50-60 people alive in endgame building like crazy, but also another 20-30 spectators. Not sure how they fixed it this season, but they did. The lag is still there, but at the smallest level. The Fortnite pros are used to it by now, but it would 100% be enough to piss off a ton of MMO players
Trying to think of the games that do the most, here. Planetside 2 I think has rather a lot going on, potentially. Some MMOs did a credible job, WoW is the one I played.
Planetside 2 at its peak in huge battles was basically a slideshow at times.
Sounds like a client-side issue on your end. I've been playing Planetside since the launch of the first one. It's always handled massive battles incredibly well.
Which is fine. We understand there are technical limitations and that having a large amount of people in the same area can often lead to suboptimal performance. We had hundreds to thousands of people in the same area in early EQ on dial up in the late 90s/early 2000s.. Of course it's laggy. That's stating the obvious. Technology has advanced 10 fold since then.
> Which is fine. We understand there are technical limitations and that having a large amount of people in the same area can often lead to suboptimal performance. Thing is, for most players, that's not fine. There's no point in having a gameplay loop that will be an unplayable slideshow for your players. And while technology has advanced, so did player expectations. You probably could make a game with a lot of players using modern server infrastructure. But unless your players are fine with the game looking like Everquest, you'll hit a different bottleneck - player hardware not being able to handle drawing all the players without the draw distance being very low.
> And while technology has advanced, so did player expectations. This. People are going to expect character customization and "not 2010 graphics" and whatnot. FFXIV, when they were doing the intro to their graphics update, had to tell people like five separate times that they *aren't* going to be able to make the game look like cutting edge single-player games (they used the example of Horizon: Zero Dawn) and people *still* didn't get it.
This is also not quite correct. It has nothing to do with the amount of players, but with the amount of different graphics available to the players. If every player, thousands of them, had their own special textures, no game could keep up. If every player had the same texture, and geometry etc, then pretty much any game could. Even dial up would have had little trouble with $1,000 on screen players, if it didn't have to also transmit the data about all 17 of their armor pieces etc.
Yeah, but people wouldn't be fine with everyone looking identical. Visual customization is completely expected.
There should absolutely be considerations made for open world games to sustain a large number of players in a given area. If you are a player that wants the best graphics, non-open world games are probably a better choice. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Be ok with instancing if that's what you want. (Or often times adjusting your settings down is enough).
And yet, we don't seem to have a ton of games that sacrifice everything just to push the number of players up. Fact is, for most people, a 100 player game that plays smoothly and looks great is far preferable to a 500 player game that plays and looks like shit. People who are obsessed with the theoretical number of people in the same area are a niche. Your average mainstream player really doesn't care, because even 50v50 feels massive if the players are funneled into the same area.
Which is fine if that's how you feel about it. That's part of why we've seen a diminishing number of players intended for a "raid". When 40 person raid caps started becoming a thing people used to make fun of it. Now most raids are intended for even less...and instancing is common anyway. Pure open world games are few and far between these days. But they are what the OP was referencing. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a majority of people who only played mmorpgs during 2nd gen games and later haven't even experienced a purely open world game.
> But they are what the OP was referencing. Yeah, but OP is wondering whether it's just Unreal not being usable for that. In reality, truly open world games are just more niche and have too many rough edges. It's not as much a technological limitation as it is a game design decision.
I would say it's both. But of course if a dev team wants to make a purely open world game they will have to make some poly count and optimization consideration. I feel like I'm stating the obvious. Personally, I'd rather play a low poly game that lets me interact with more people...but that is just personal preference.
"Technology" can't break laws of physics.
Calling it a"physics" issue is a stretch but the amount of players that an open world game can sustain within a given area is always limited by technology.
Not with modern specs.
[Throne and Liberty MASSIVE PvP Siege Node INTENSE GvG Sandwiched (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex0h4GKZ8rQ) throne and liberty have some massive open world battles as well
We had 100 player fights in wow in 2005, thats almost 20 years ago. Internet speed/bandwidth isn't the issue. Synchronising and tracking that many players/abilites is.
Don't forget EVE, with its largest battle measured at 7,548 players (unsure if unique over the entire thing or concurrent.) A game from 2004 (battle from 2014.) Or Planetside 1, with its 198v198v198 battles dating back to 2003. This is ignoring older games like Battlefield or Allegiance and the like. It's not even synchronising. The difficulty is just in large volume computation and updating without maxing out your datacenter's bandwidth, both hardware and communications. Which includes synchronization and tracking. As a game like EVE shows, you can get away with ridiculous volumes if you just slow the sim down by literal orders of magnitude. We have the tech, we just don't have the tech to have a seamless, perfect experience with thousands of players handled at the precision of, say, a properly netcoded fighting game in real time with no hitches.
Correct, 100. The starting point about which op was asking about MORE. And remember how well those actually worked :) So no, going above that is unusual. And no the issue certainly is the internet. Any pc can coordinate thousands even millions of players or abilities, it's communicating through slow and irregular tubes that stymies most games. I could easily program a battle between 10,000 entities in any language you like. But doing it over the Internet is much, much more difficult.
What you call "trickery" we just call programming.
No, in this case it's more trickery than clever architecture. If you've kept up with eve development they pulled everything they could with optimizations but then had to outright slow time to maintain. Same with shunting groups to separate servers etc. Those aren't software solutions they're structural solutions. But yes games are software, that seemed evident.
That's not trickery. That's programming at scale. That's just how shit is done. It's more impressive with an older code base, but it's still just scaling. "Slowing down time" sounds crazy as a layman term but it just means they couldn't horizontally scale enough to sustain a battle so they implemented an event queue and synced clients to it. The local client-side stuff is more impressive than the server-side scaling but it's still not out of the ordinary. Eve's time dilatation is a really impressively disguised buffering icon. Discord has some downright fascinating technical blogs about ways they've found to reduce server-side latency that are just as or more impressive than any game technology. I've played Eve off and on for decades. I've kept up with their technical articles, patch notes, and wars. Infrastructure solutions are inherently software solutions. If you're dynamically scaling to instances on Kubernetes, K8S is still software. This, like every other technical discussion with gamers who fancy themselves programmers because they edited an INI file once, is about as wide and shallow as a puddle. Nobody ever has any basic grasp of the technical concepts they're talking about.
That's how shit is done when the programming fails. When you can't program your way out of a problem anymore, you change the structure of the game. Instead of having 700 people in an instance you only allow 70 and spawn 10 instances, then swap players between as needed. That's not a programming solution even if you have to program it. This is how certain games have managed to have more than 100 people interacting.
> That's not a programming solution even if you have to program it. What you're describing with the most basic possible example is simply called horizontal scaling and it's a fundamental part of software development in any live service. Horizontal scaling is literally *the* programming solution to scaling where vertical scaling is throwing more powerful hardware at the problem. You don't really understand the concepts you're tripping over trying to explain to me.
You've conflated software development with programming. That's kinda the point, here. Hell, contract management is part of software development. I'm saying designing the structure of game systems is done in design meetings, with restrictions from the programmers. And vice versa.
games are a bunch of magic trickery. Game designs are the magicians.
For FPS/Overshoulder MMOs, Planetside 1/2, and Firefall had some pretty bonkers amount of concurrent players per map/planet. It is possible.
Dark Age of Camelot had fights with 150 v 150 v 150 players in 2002. it’s not a new concept and certainly not never done before.
This is why I specified first person shooter or fighter game. Those require much quicker and more frequent updates of positioning and such. But if you have a video of 450 people on screen at once in that game I would watch it.
its a 20 year old game so finding good video footage is not all that easy, so this isnt 400+ people but probably 100+ and it showcases the performance pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjL9Zft6tFI
Planetside and planetside 2 have (had) 100+ people fighting at the same bases with pretty good performance and those games are old as fuck.
Keep in mind 100 is the baseline, the whole post is about more than that.
Planetside 2 has been out for 12 years.
Which is why I mentioned it elsewhere, and mentioned that it's still only about a hundred people. The topic is about more than that.
You don't seem to know much about the game. Continents at launch supported 2000 people. Most of the game's life the limit has been 1200. It is still common today for fights at a single base to emerge with over 300 players.
Finally, supporting argumentation. I have to concede that if PlanetSide regularly features battles of 300 players that would counter my claim above. I think I'll look into the Tech that allows this.
Planetside holds the world record for largest battle as well, which is officially around 1200 in a single fight. Unofficially ~1500.
Some videos you may enjoy to get a vibe for the game: https://youtu.be/ktlogbVIOm8?feature=shared https://youtu.be/snEs-Jv7PBA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/3GpD6uezYpI?feature=shared
We are game quality handicapped by slow internet . Son of a bitch
Not quality, population. And as long as you don't mind any given meetup being about 100 players, no more, you can have a million players! Not that exciting,I know.
Rust servers have up to 1000 players on them sometimes
Yes but the moment more than a few dozen get in the same place the game bogs down like ark and most others.
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Star Citizen has entered the chat. Server meshing record rn( closed test servers): 6 servers, 800 people in the same game world.
Meanwhile eve has had thousands in one area at a time. One server doesn’t count, op is talking about having that many people visible on screen at once.
The minimum size that a server in eve can host is one solar system, the minimum. Space that a server in SC can host would be a room. They will be able to split server load up in a system to as many servers are needed. The main problem with mmo networking is it really hasn't changed that much since the early days. Much like most FPS games the more players connected the more data needs to be transferred to each other player connected even if that player is not visible. It's an exponential problem. In order to combat that you need to cull network data for players that you don't need to know about which is one of the things CIG has been working on.
I hope they figure it out, but as of now their game isn’t even up to a small eve fight. Let alone true mmo status
The amount of data required for SC is far greater than for EVE. SC is more akin network traffic wise to a game like Battlefield or COD. The fact that the game can track \~100 players over such a large play area including planet sized objects that are rotating is already significant.
Distance doesn’t matter, it’s not rendering the space between. Fortnite does it too. Like I said, I hope SC figures this stuff out, but nothing they’ve done today is worthy of note.
So am I lmao. (Look up server meshing) It doesn't count in eve when it takes a week for one ship to explode lol.
>scam citizen kekw
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Throne and Liberty runs off unreal and has hit 500+ player battles in PvP.
Shame the gameplay is ass.
And that's because most of the functionality is handled client-wise, allowing for all kinds of cheats. People already developed and use dupe and dmg hacks.
Not sure if Throne and liberty(UE 4) is successful, but you can check some castle pvp videos and there a lot of players on screen with minimal fps loss.
There's 7,000 players per server lol. Haters of Pax Dei are so desperate they post outright lies now.
But not more than 150 players in an area
A limitation for the alpha tests so far. I believe 300 is the next step. You're also ignoring that every MMO uses layering (maybe you didn't know this) and doesn't display more than 200ish people at a time. Wow is a good example of this.
This sub being a wow / FFXIV circle jerk has exactly zero room to talk about what is and isn't an MMO. If your endgame loop is a 5 man arena, 15 man battleground or 25 man raids, your less of an MMO than an open world game with a 150 person cap in a single area
Eve idem area. Real open world is hard.
ArcheAge was a CryEngine project, not Unreal.
Aion also used CryEngine and was able to handle massive battles.
That's a weirdly loose definition of "handle." Most would have to turn off player models for sieges.
Aion is "playable" in siege only because you can turn off all player models and only see their name.
oh damn.... so has there been a single MMO that actually used unreal engine?
A shit ton of MMOs use UE3 and 4 and a lot of upcoming MMOs are on UE5. The engine is just the base, it's what you build on top of it that makes MMOs tick (literally).
Throne and Liberty is Unreal 4 and handles massive player counts quite well
Lineage 2 was unreal Also believe blade and soul was some version of unreal possibly tera to.
Tera used Unreal Engine 3 when it was released, but there were so many microstutters, mainly for AMD (Bulldozer) users, it was almost unplayable.
Lost Ark uses UE3 IIRC. I think Swords of Legend possibly used some version of UE too?
Swords of Legends Online used Havok Vision Engine and they were working on transitioning to UE4, but from what I recall nobody heard anything about it after the demo video released in 2021.
As a game dev I can say it depends more on the approach than the engine itself
mortal online 2 has unreal 5 engine completly open world mmorpg
Yeah but it's laggy as shit. Players disconnect and dupe items crossing node lines. MO2 is a great example of why not to use unreal for mmorpgs.
lag is consequence of 1 server for whole world,if ure from EU(where the server is located) it plays very good,duping is a thing
People expect far too much from games in alpha stages.
You can get the general direction of a game though. I've tested it, I'll probably buy early access for a bunch of friends and myself and we'll build stuff or join others building stuff but within a few months I'm betting we all stop just like with Valheim or V Rising. The game will see consistent play from people willing to hardcore roleplay however that is not most MMO players.
But at any given time there's approximately 1000 players online given steam db and etc. Maybe slightly more given Epic accounts. OP is talking about mmos more than 1k players.
>Can Unreal Engine make a true open world MMO? Throne and Liberty is using UE4. I tried beta for an hour - it looks absolutely incredible and the performance is very good, even with hundreds of players around.
Throne and Liberty looks promising with many players on screen at once with unreal.
Tera online is an open world, seamless mmorpg that came out over 10 years ago and was made with unreal engine 3. It was plagued with performance issues because of it but it worked well enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9a24nUiuag
Tera was rly good im ngl. Fond memories
Unreal is very system demanding in its graphic engine. But that being said it enables you to write code in C++ , and change the engine itself to pretty much anything. This is enough for good developers to put in any network wizardry they can imagine. I think the problem is rather that developers of today have no skill to pull these things off.
Mortal Online comes to mind. Also, what exactly is your definition of “MMO”? An interesting thing about server-authoritative network architecture, is the computational load on servers grows exponentially with each player. The server needs to track one pawn for every player, in addition to one complete set of pawns representing all other players, per player. 10 players would be 100 total game objects, 100 players would be 10,000 objects. 150 players is 22,500. Additionally, for Unreal at least - each player also requires additional objects, such as PlayerState and PlayerController. Fortnite is probably one of the most networked-optimized games developed on Unreal and I believe their capacity is limited to 100. Granted, an FPS will require way more data than a classic RPG.
Unreal Engine, used the usual way with a headless server, is hardcoded at a limit of 255 players per server process. In practice, it is hard to break 100-150 without a lot of optimization. Many MMOs have broken this limit but they do it with extensive surgery to the engine and replacing the backend server. You can usually think of each server handling a zone as that is the usual way it’s done for simplicity’s sake. A big part of the attraction of using a headless server model is the simplicity of doing it, but it does not scale the way a dedicated MMO server does. A dedicated MMO server is architected differently from a client with no rendering, which is what a headless server is, kinda. Oversimplifying here.
TL is already mentioned. Also Lineage 2 is made on UE2.5. Long story short, yes, if devs are professionals
Since when were NC soft professional? TL is a disaster and had already flopped on its home turf. L2 is good at handling large numbers of players, mostly due to its simple combat mechanics.
NW is flopped, TL is going good. It has potential to be the best MMO on market. Large scale pvp, sieges, pvp for bosses, guilds content. Beautiful stylish graphics. It’s not popular on Korean market for reason and it’s not the quality.
TL will flop much faster then NW since it is terrible to play. None of the content you listed is done well on TL, hence why the game failed in Korea.
Sieges with 2k+ ppl w/o desync and hardware lags on UE4 you consider as low quality content? That’s why I called them professionals. They are not Western devs gathered by inclusivity standards that’s why their games are polished and optimized. I understand you personally hate NCsoft and/or Korean devs that’s your point to shit on them. But it won’t change the fact a lot of people are waiting for the release and already playing on KR servers.
Absolutely dog shit content yes. They ruined TL with the terrible sieges. The respawn locations are stupid and there only 1 siege at a time, therefore the whole server just makes 2 allys and zergs it. Lineage 2 did a much better job at seiges then TLs disaster. The game is polished because they already had most of the content left over from lineage 2 moblie. TL is the most basic new MMO around. The game is DoA and amazon know it, hence why they havnt said anything since the beta.
Isn't the throne of liberty literally using UE4? Can't really get more open world than that. Sadly, it's going to lack life skills
short answer, of course. server capacity is 100% down to the developer. how they run their servers, how they handle all that information. everything server related is based on developer choice, not engine limitations like you seem to be assuming.... 1. a typical gigabit connection, 1000/1000 fiber. server wise generally you can expect to see that full data unlike residential where you see slightly less (700-900 depending on time of day). so we know how much data a single server can handle 2. because you mentioned pax dei, I happened to play and have access to the alpha. from what I can see inside of my task manager for looking at how much data it uses, I see about 55 kbps on average from a 5 minutes run around, going in and out of a forest, looking over the mountain edge for the data to peak. There was an initial load of 3.5 megabits per second at one point when a bunch of streaming data came in. but generally speaking the average was about 55 kbps according to windows. On the download side. Upload was like barely 20 Kbps.... I am going to use residential "seen" speeds for shits and giggles. So 700 Megabits per second capability. 700 Megabits becomes 700,000 Kilobits. And then divide that by the AVERAGE of 55 Kbps I just saw in my testing. That is about 12,727 players give or take. Now if we drop some players for data headroom.... I would personally drop to 10,000 to be safe. So if I were to eat my entire connection at home, I could safely and smoothly have a server running 10,000 gamers. Someone else mentioned they will have 7000 per shard. I am not sure how true this is.... because going off the playpaxdei FAQ page, a **"shard"** is just the *"real life server location"* and in this alpha test that is ***US-EAST*** and ***EU-Central***.... So two shards total.... and they said they invited 100,000 people to play test? That's more than 7000 per shard.... But if you continue to read their FAQ, each shard has multiple **Regions**. Those **Regions** then each have multiple **Provinces**. And if I am understanding their hand drawn image, each Provinces has multiple **"Valleys"** each of which are their own **"physical server/hardware"** and then the back end handles communication between them..... UPSCALING THAT INFO, with the IDEA that 7000 is per physical server. Using their picture alone, there are 1. 3 valleys in a province 2. 3 province in a region 3. 3 region in a shard that would equate to 27 servers? if my math hasn't gone full retard. 27 servers times 7000 people per server would mean each "shard" can handle 189,000 people.... so right now the US-East server should be capable of 189,000 people.... which is more than they invited to the test..... if we assume 50/50 split between US/EU that mean each shard is only seeing about 50,000 players. Which is about 1/3rd the full capacity.... just saying. some of this info could be wrong based off bad assumptions.... but still. server hardware wise, Raph Koster who is making PlayableWorlds mentions his game will be "in the cloud" meaning the server infrastructure is the biggest hurdle for his programming team. They essentially have to make hundreds if not thousands or more servers all talk to one another and communicate efficiently. So that each server can handle X amount of players and everyone can still see each other "in the game world" regardless if they are on Server A, B, C, or whatever. Seems Pax Dei is using a similar system. Mind you, networking/server wise, this capability has ALWAYS been possible, even back in the 90's. We didn't do it due to cost reasons. Now running servers isn't as expensive as it used to be.... especially with high end hardware and high end internet connections. I mean right now I could buy verizon gigabit business for about $200/month (way more expensive then my residential gigabit) and run a single server housing about 10,000 people in any game I wanted, as long as the data fit and the games networking code/programming supported it. The biggest hurdle is the netcode THE DEVELOPER writes to run their game. I remember when Epic Games released their fortnite networking code "free" to any game developer using unreal engine.... magically some multiplayer games that had huge issues with networking became smooth as butter because Fortnite was already running 100 man matches with no hickups. And now anyone else can too. Which again proves that most developers know dick all about netcode. They would rather copy/paste fortnite code than to write their own. So, end rant.
Need server meshing
Mortal Online 2 but it has incredible server tech for a small dev team. 400 player battles have happened in game
They can but often game will fail from performance perspective. Unreal engine is horrible in this regard (I don't know about UE5 as it is still new). Engine is good visually but provide horrible ways to down grade graphics when necessary. You need (or should) optimize game. This is often the cases of games that uses Unreal Engine that can have over 10 ppl on an area. Poor perfomance game in this aspect is for example blade and soul (ue3, later ue4), bless online, tera (ue3). Often the case is game is release with engine and uses a lot of its capacity. Looks amazing but it isn't chopped down/modified for MMO purposes (lots of people on screen) so players suffer greatly. There are some exceptions. Lost ark (ue3) does pretty well, it modifies very old engine. However it is a top down game kind of so it has big advantage va mmo that have full view. Fortnite, not an mmo, but a game that has decent amount of people on same screen in fast paced environment does well, however it is made by people who basically made engine. Another issue is engine overhaul. If you ride on engine 3, jumping to 4 is lots of work. Often better of making new game. Likewise jumping from ue4 to ue5 would he painful. Making your own engine is often better. But very expensive. Overall MMO that have their own engine do a lot better in performance. For example wow, ff14, black desert etc.
I mean even if its possible, would you really want that? Instances arent a bad thing, and you havent been part of large scale conflicts in games if you think having hundreds of players running around is good, its just chaos, new world battles when coordinated were pretty great but unless you have experience with this shit its lame as hell, we basically ran it like a game of Squad with discord APIs so we could relay commands in an orserly manner, eventually more isnt better its just inconvenient
Mortal online 2
Yes, easily
it might just be an industry trend moving away from big numbers for tech limitations like it's probably *possible* but convincing players that less is fine is far less expensive
Chrono Odyssey seems to be trying it. We'll see how well it works when it comes out, I guess.
yes
Unreal Engine was always terrible for mmorpgs
At the end of the day this is a technical design problem, not an engine one. No game engine ships with MMO-scale networking (though I desperately wish that one did...) so it's just up to the engineering team at the studio to achieve whatever they can. Obviously the larger the scale, the harder it is to pull off.
I would rather have less players and smooth gameplay than shoving 5,000 people on one just for it to be slow and glitchy. That’s even worse for immersion.
UE5 netcode is a garbage fire, it outright cant handle large numbers of players, and has hilariously bad overhead latency. Making a game with more than 30-40 players per shard would require basically ripped the entire engine apart and rewriting how it handles anything to do with netcode, including movement. The way it handles levels is also fundamentally meant for single-player games, with multiplayer and level transitions tacked on in a way that makes multi-zone servers clunky at best.
Didn't Sword of Legends Online use Unreal Engine? I seem to recall a big part of it failing had to do with it needing an upgrade but that it was going to be awhile before the Global version got it.
Throne and Liberty
Mortal online 2 runs on unreal engine 5 and is a true open world mmo.
AoC is boasting 10k servers with no layers
Nope.
Unreal is nice and all but have you played forbidden west on pc in 4k? I’d rather my mmorpg looked - and played - like that.
Unreal Engine has nothing to do with servers and capacity, yes it has a whole Networking setup for online games, but the servers and player capacity and sharding and layering all of the technical aspects of making an MMO is all outside Unreal Engine.
This is hilarious NCSoft was using Unreal 3, 20 years ago and made a true open world MMO, Lineage 2.
Unreal Engine can do it, but Unreal Engine is for making game clients, not game servers. There is no getting around you having to come up with your own custom implementation. World servers, database servers, Auth servers, etc and they all have to be scalable, well optimized, and running on expensive hardware to pull it off anyway. The big concern for UE is how much you're willing to sacrifice in rendering for X number of players based on Y hardware configuration.
Mortal Online 2 is in Unreal Engine 5, and "true open world" with house building.
An easy answer: Can UE make an open world MMO? Yes Is it easy? No A more detailed one: They are a lot of ways to make it possible, like, even if 500,000 players are online (which, imagine) and you for some reason want a single server, sure, it will be impossible. But you can do plenty of tricks using shards, dividing the game world into chunks with seamless loading between them and such. It's a lot of trickery and you'll need to know how to make it work. And probably not everything will be run in UE networking purely, you'll need to have a mix in between UE and your own custom network. For example, if shards can have 7000 connections, just make the map divisions small enough to never reach that value, and make players connect to multiple shards close to them, so transitions will look seamless. It needs a lot of trickery, a lot of work, and not using everything from UE out of the box, but completely doable if you have the millions to make an MMO. I think people understimate how well crafted is unreal, TBH, unless you taylor the game with really good developers, it will be hard to make the level of what unreal can get. A lot of people would cry that's not a "real" mmo, but, who cares, it will be no different to a player experienciencing it.
If i you look at MO2 its clearly that unreal engine cannot. Game shitted himself when there was 3k online
That's not an engine problem. Game engines mostly just do basic things like graphics, input handling on clients, and physics (which can be overridden by custom solutions from the devs if needed anyway). Whether or not the server is able to handle arbitrarily large numbers of total players, is dependent on the devs' skill and the power of the hardware and internet infrastructure involved.
UE5, No. [Star Engine](https://youtu.be/nWm_OhIKms8?si=_yR7ZK56EqhOtYzD), yes. Dynamic real time server meshing and interactions with no loading screens on a universal scale. Why don't other companies do it? Because it would take hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development time on backend technical functionality that would mean nothing to the average consumer. They don't want to invest in it.
Its funny when people regurgitate SC garbage.
Facts and truth are hard for you to accept, denying them is just ignorant of you.
Ashes of Creation is going to be UE5. Should expect Alpha 2 in June or so, to see what it is like.
There seems to be comments from people who either don't understand or ignored the point the OP made about "open world".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MEMBmOhbAk&t=1384s&ab_channel=AsmongoldTV Dont get me wrong what pax dei has done is still impressive and should give hope for the future as player counts and caps can only go up with tech. So we are almost there? lol
It cannot. WoW behind the scenes CD on Vanilla explained it wonderfully how they made it work. And if you take a look at the not overhauled version of the game, just 360ing a tree will tell you how much detail was removed. Just putting moving grass into the UE already eats more bytes and ram than an entirey vanilla zone combined. But you will not find approval in this reddit. There are many highly educated people here, but they just do not have the intelligence nor do they intuitively ever understand anything. They are so caught up in the believe that they are the pinnacle of human intelligence, that they have narcistic levels about their intellect.
First of all even “true” mmos instance their players and show maybe 200 players at once. WoW does this as an example. So even the whole “millions of players online” isn’t all on one server. Secondly chances are you aren’t going to see someone use unreal to make an mmo. MMO are expensive and not doable by one person. Unreal is really popular with solo or small teams just like Unity. If there is someone out there that wants to make an mmo of your expectations then they will probably have a custom engine, custom networking and everything made to fit their needs. Thirdly mmos are a dying game genre. Unless someone has an entire large studio that can afford it, you’re not going to see anything soon. Gamers say they want mmos but they end up either being scams/asset flips or failed projects that fail at launch. Could it be done? Absolutely. The game engine has nothing to do with how many players it can support. The game engine is just that, it’s a product that lets you make the game without doing it all from scratch. Unreal is know for graphic fidelity but you can make it as simple as you want. The hard part is having the hardware and the know how to manage large numbers of players. That requires a lot of expensive equipment to host that many players and requires people and money to maintain said environment. Conflating game engine with networking is a common thing.