Dual Universe: How Would 30,000 Players Look on One Server?

Increasing the number of simultaneous participants is one of the biggest challenges every online game faces. Developers have implemented different strategies in recent years to reduce overall load and minimize the impact of lag, but the folks at Dual Universe have a different vision: all players on the same stage, at the same time. When we say ‘all players,’ the potential is in the millions, and in one of their first tests they had 30,000. While most of them were simulated, real players reported no errors or performance loss.

One of the most appealing aspects of recent battle royale titles is the number of players participating in a single match. 100 players in PUBG and Fortnite, 20 squads of three in Apex Legends… these are impressive numbers. There are more extreme cases like EVE Online, but the developers created a time dilation system to mask lag when servers are under heavy load. So how far are we from achieving sessions with thousands of players simultaneously in the same virtual space, without technical tricks or shortcuts? Thanks to the efforts of Novaquark, the company developing Dual Universe, we can visualize the answer:

What you just saw is a demo with 30,000 simultaneous players. Technically, most of the players are simulated, but several community members served as witnesses and alpha testers to evaluate overall performance. Lag issues never appeared, and no server crashes were reported. Of course, the story will be very different when all players are real, each with their own latency, distance, and secondary connectivity details, but that doesn't take away from this demo. While other online games limit their tests to 100 or 200 players, Dual Universe went straight to 30,000, and that's no small feat.

Now the question is: Would you like to participate in such a game? I mean thousands of players sharing the same space in real time. They could organize parties, special events, and why not, campaigns of chaos and destruction with the goal of reducing that world to rubble. Dual Universe promises to combine aspects of EVE Online, Star Citizen (the Duke Nukem Forever of this generation), No Man's Sky, Minecraft, and Space Engineers. If it delivers on that promise, its online implementation will need to be flawless.

Official announcement: Click here