Gaming Minute: Giant Bomb Gaming Minute 01/16/2014 - The New Rise of Local Multiplayer

Jeff Gerstmann likes the internet, but this new batch of competitive local multiplayer games is providing some pretty solid reasons to stay offline.

Jan. 16 2014

Posted by: Jeff

@hassun: Solid online MP will never be doable in these games :/ Remember how in Quake back in the day you had to lead your targets because their ping meant they were actually not where you saw them? That worked somewhat reasonably in Quake and other fps'es because you needed to hit with more than one bullet most of the time. When one hit kills, though, you sorta need to know exactly where the other player is, and where you are in relation to him.

The more latency you get, the more unplayable it gets. I don't think we'll ever see games like this in MP :/ I rarely if ever see servers in games with lots of players that are below 16ms ping. With music production while playing instruments and listening back to them at the same time, anything above 8ms will be bad, anything more than 5 if you're playing drums. in shooters you start noticing lag at around 60ms, even lower if you're really looking for it. In games like Samurai Gunn and whatnot, where you MIGHT have 100 dudes online at any point in time (games like these never have a sizeable online community, mostly because they're not really suited for online, but also because online isn't as fun as one might think these games should be) which means your ping will most likely be bad for the vast majority of the battles.

There's a limit to how low our pings will get. The only chance of having games like these work in MP is everyone having fibre and living in china-like population density areas. This has made me sad ever since MP gaming became a thing. Latency can not be bested, so our limitations are pretty much reached.