He admits that, “to a small degree,” that approach may reduce the number of instances running with a single player, but he adds, “Did it make the game mildly irritating for every player who tried it? Yes, absolutely.”
BioWare, he says, seemed undeterred — likening the studio’s posture to that of a doomsday prepper. Darrah points out that a nearly identical argument was raised during discussions about Mass Effect’s multiplayer: developers feared that matchmaking or server load could financially strain EA if too many players connected simultaneously.
His view is that while encouraging players to team up makes sense, there’s a line where design choices begin optimizing for highly improbable scenarios at the expense of the everyday player experience.
With Anthem headed toward shutdown amid the Stop Killing Games movement, Darrah suggests we might be willing to “sacrifice some things to prevent games from simply disappearing one day.”
Source: gamesradar.com
