Why games choose four as a multiplayer magic number

One may be the loneliest number, but four can sometimes feel just as limited. There’s something about that four-player magic number that has become the standard for multiplayer games. And there are tons of great games and upcoming titles: Sea of ​​Thieves, Back 4 Blood, Vermintide 2, Redfall, No Man’s Sky, the Borderlands series, Galactic Deep Rock, most of Grand Theft Auto Online, Grounded, Anacruse, phasmophobia – which makes you choose three other friends and buckle up.

Larger groups have to find alternative solutions or another game entirely. This can get awkward – I’ve had several nights where three friends and I are on Discord, having a great time, and then a fifth friend joins the channel and asks what’s up. We all fall into an embarrassing silence for a moment, because we are all having a great time, and the newcomer can hang out and listen, or leave, rejected and alone.

I started wondering: Why don’t developers just add plus players? If some games can do it, why can’t all of them? It’s a seemingly simple question with surprisingly complex answers. Fortunately, the developers behind some very important multiplayer titles were able to share their thoughts.

Image: Rare / Microsoft Studios

Mike Chapman, Creative Director, Rare

What factors led you to design your game around four players?

For Sea of ​​ThievesWhile the nature of the game’s shared world is a key aspect of the design, the main game was designed to make players truly feel like they are working together as a crew, sailing their ship, collecting treasure, and surviving in a sea. dangerous. We designed the game around the desire to make the interactions between our players deep and meaningful, so many of our design decisions focus on putting the choice in the hands of the players, rather than dictating exactly how they play.

With this in mind, we think of the four-player pick in terms of how this applies in real life. If you imagine any type of social gathering, four people is a really good number in terms of ease of conversations and interactions. While, of course, more people can be positive, it inevitably means that people are more likely to split into subgroups, have parallel conversations and interactions, before returning to the main group and splitting up into different subgroups again.

When you then apply that again to the design of Sea of ​​ThievesWhile more players is positive, it relies on an exceptionally strong social bond or additional game systems that add to the complexity of the game design to keep everyone working together. We wanted the interactions between the players on a team to be as natural as possible. We often joked that going on an adventure in Sea of ​​Thieves You should feel like going on a pub trip with your friends, not going to your school reunion!

Image: Rare / Microsoft Studios

When was this decision made during development and what was the conversation like?

This was a decision that was made very early in development during our prototyping phase. Since the vision of the game focused on teams of players working together in a shared world, one of the first important areas defined was the design of the game. Sea of ​​Thieves galleon and how the interactive elements of the ship were designed from the ground up for four players: the winch, sail pulleys, and the handling and maintenance of the ship’s core, including the rate of water fill in the hull, the additional speed through the water provided by each properly aligned candle and, finally, how treasure always remains physical in the world. All of these decisions, and how this led to the balancing of these mechanics, are the result of the decision to design the galleon for four players based on what seemed like the right size for a social group that may not always be the closest friends in the real life. , or know each other very well.

Why do you think four players is a common design choice among cooperative games?

It really comes down to the difference between what it feels like to actually work with other players, versus just working alongside others or playing in parallel with them trying to achieve more unique goals. While large player counts in team-based games, usually in double figures, is really the norm for cooperative experiences, it’s actually about the optimal number to keep that close and intimate conversation flowing between players. . Certainly there is an element of previous multiplayer experiences that focus on four players due to the number of times you can split the screen on a single TV, but with Sea of ​​Thieves We found that four players also provided that kind of close-knit, intimate player interaction that helped immerse players in our world and make them work together.

Image: Mojang / Xbox Game Studios via Polygon

Måns Olson, Game Director, Minecraft Dungeons

What factors led you to design your game around four players?

A key factor is that the number of players varies according to the game sessions. Minecraft dungeons supports up to four players playing together, either online or cooperatively, on many different platforms. There are many nuances and balance to support both for solo play and for up to three other people. We want to make sure the experience is fun and relatively similar, regardless of how you play. For example, the geometry of the mission should be designed in such a way that players have room to maneuver while still using choke points to their advantage. Enemies must arrive in such numbers that they are a threat, without being completely overwhelming. Since you play the same missions regardless of the number of players, and players can join or leave at any time, keeping the interval relatively small (1-4 instead of, say, 1-12) causes a lot of design and design considerations. game are a problem. a little easier.

Our supported platforms are also one of the main reasons we made this decision. Game consoles have traditionally supported up to four players, and while many now support more than that, it has become an established standard that is useful for gamers and developers alike. As developers, we know that many gamers have one to four controllers available to play together, but very few households have more than that connected to a single console. Games that stay at or at least close to that goal are good for gamers as they can repurpose their hardware for different games, and good for developers because they can point to a common denominator. This doesn’t matter as much for online games, but it is an important factor for games that support couch co-op.

Image: Mojang / Xbox Game Studios via Polygon

When was this decision made during development and what was the conversation like?

Minecraft dungeons was originally conceived as a single player game. Within a few months of development, when we started testing prototypes internally, we all really wanted to play the game in multiplayer mode. We sat down as a team to talk about the best way to go about it, ending with an approach that is partially inspired by classic dungeon crawlers, but also heavily inspired by notable four-player co-op titles like Left 4 Dead and Warhammer: End of time – Vermintide. There is something very attractive about the degree of cooperation that those games offer, where the players really have to work together to achieve the best results. At the same time, we wanted to continue to support the single-player kernel that we had already started building. Throughout development, we’ve been wrong on the “multiplayer fun” side, but we’ve tried to support a variety of player experiences where possible to make the game accessible and accessible to a wide group. of players.

Why do you think four players is a common design choice among cooperative games?

I think a combination of factors works together to make four a great choice. The traditional controller cover for consoles is an important historical reason. Another is that, like Dungeons, many games can be played both alone and with friends, and keeping the player count close makes the experience more consistent.

That being said, I suspect that there is also a more human factor at play. When collaborating with others, we can only collect certain information at a time, and a player may count to about four to maximize fun by achieving a good mix of complex and interesting coordination and avoiding information overload. I think there is an analogy in team sports, where many popular sports have relatively few players at the same time. I think the same reasoning can be extended to online games – I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the most popular MOBAs and online shooters pit teams of five against each other. Finally, it’s a matter of practicality: gathering a few friends to play a game is much easier than trying to find the ten you would need for a soccer team.

Image: Obsidian Entertainment / Microsoft Game Studios

Adam Brennecke, the director of the game Grounded

What factors led you to design your game around four players?

Even from our initial speech, Grounded was conceptualized as a cooperative multiplayer survival game with characters and story. So how do we land on four players? Two didn’t seem like enough for a party, and more than four seemed like too many for each character to have a different personality. At the end of day four, it felt good to think about working together as a team.

Some of our favorite ‘teams’ from our wild’ 80s childhoods were four, like Ghostbusters and Ninja Turtles, and we wanted to capture this feeling with four different personalities to choose from when playing. Grounded. On top of that, from a development perspective, four players are manageable in both technology and game design. Combat and loot, for example, can be balanced in a team of four, and it gets a lot more complex the more players are added to the mix.

When was this decision made during development and what was the conversation like?

It was a very early decision. I think it was made during the launch process and we haven’t thought about it too much, which means it was a good fit.

Why do you think four players is a common design choice among cooperative games?

One thing that comes to mind is what we are used to is four players as players. My favorite multiplayer games, even going back to the arcades, have supported four players. I am assuming some of these decisions were made due to screen size versus character size, memory limitations, and physical space of the controller in the arcade cabinet. Later, the home couch co-op normalized to four players due to the fact that consoles have supported four controllers for years as standard, and the split screen works great with four.