The idea of a fifty person multiplayer experience via Live is not a new one, although KAOS Studios is the first to pitch it in the HD era with Frontlines: Fuel of War– a game that looks eerily like GRAW 2 if you squint hard enough when looking at the still shots.
Frontlines: FoW is clearly deeply dependent on its gameplay to bring home the bacon. Its single-player performs well enough to get players to work their way through for the achievement points it’s the multiplayer that will hook some FPS fanatics.
"I'd expected its open nature to feel like a series of watered down multiplayer matches, but once you get into the heat of action it's a thrilling experience."
Frank DeLise, General Manager of Kaos Studios has posted a comment stating that some of the 360 Frontline servers will be capped at 50. He also goes on to say that they have tested up to 73. This tops the previous online limit of 40 players on Resistance.
To celebrate the fact that a multiplayer demo has now gone live on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace for Frontlines: Fuel of War, we can now bring you an interview with the game's Associate Producer Joe Halpen, courtesy of the Xbox Community Network.
It's hefty at over a gigabyte in girth, but lets you hop into 32-player online battles so that's alright then. These are a key part of its lure too, as you get to use a massive garage of 60 vehicles to trample your opponents with.
Frank Delise of Kaos posted this comment on the Xbox forums in response to a question about the soon to be released MP demo (by the way the demo has had most of the single player bugs ironed out) in particular hosting of matches.
"You can host matches up to 16 players on the xbox. Anything above that (16-32) is on a dedicated PC server.
"When you create a match on the Xbox, you can reserve as many slots as you want for your friends. You can also adjust any setting, such as upgrade speeds, which weapons are available, which roles are available, which vehicles are available, etc..
The multiplayer demo will have all of these options available to you to play with."
Whilst I was heartened by the early comments from both of these previews I was bit dissapointed that they did not touch on the 32 player aspect for the Xbox. In particular whether dedicated servers will be on offer as I struggled to see how 32 games will be handled when servers are being casually handled by listen servers.
[At last] we were given the chance to really put the game through the stress-test wringer by pitting ourselves against 15 other game journalists for an eight-a-side Xbox 360 multiplayer session across a range of maps, including a few new ones.
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