SPOnG caught up with Stephen Hood of Codemasters, Chief Game Designer for F1 2011 recently to ask many things (full interview later). One thing that popped up were the problems in getting 24 players online.
Stephen told us that, "You can say in an ideal world that the PC could have 24 players over a peer to peer connection, but the problem is not the power of the PC, but the variation of the technology everyone is using. This extends to variation in connection quality as well.
"At least with consoles, Microsoft and Sony quite rightly put certain restrictions on things in order to make sure that for a large majority of people, the game experience is going to be very good", he continued.
Before he gave us some insight into the thinking underlying a developer and platform holder relations:
"With Sony and Microsoft on the other hand, we have to work within their restrictions and we just have to become cleverer about how we get around those restrictions. With another year’s development time, we can go for 24 cars online."
Stay tuned for the full interview.