One of the best co-op games you can play right now on PlayStation 3 is Borderlands 2 (if you don’t believe me, ask Chandler and his wife). In an interview with AusGamers at PAX Australia, Paul Hellquist, Creative Director, talked about the possibilities of expanding co-op beyond four players on next-gen consoles:
There’s obviously more power, so some of those performance things will diminish, but… [laughs] we are always filling up all of the performance we are given by the hardware manufacturers, so I’m sure we’ll have different challenges. But there is also a thing we’ve talked a lot about internally with going more than four, where we think that if we go too much more than four, the experience will actually start to break down; that four is kind of a nice sweet spot, in terms of enough craziness, and of all of these different personalities and character classes and everything, but you can still kind of keep track of what’s happening.
We do have a little bit of a worry that if we go to eight or sixteen or something crazy, that everyone will spread out, and you’ll kind of actually lose that more intimate “We’re working together” kind of experience. So there’s an interesting balance there that we’ll need to investigate.
While we’ll have to wait and see if Gearbox decides to go past four player co-op on the PS4/Xbox One, Paul answered the question of why Borderlands 2 was stuck at four player co-op:
It’s mostly for performance, to keep the network bandwidth down low enough that everyone can have a rich and fast-paced experience. Because Borderlands is a very fast-paced game. So if we went further than that, frame rates and all that kind of stuff would suffer.
Would you like to see Gearbox go past 4 player co-op in Borderlands 3? Or do you find that 4 players is the sweet spot? Let us know in the comments below.
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