The new Siege of Orison is limited to four players. What was the decision around changing that?
TL;DRThe four-player limit came from wanting to test a curated, linear mission without outside influence, with bigger parties possible later, while the old Siege, built for fewer players and later upped to around a hundred, was unbalanced.
So it was actually... I've seen a lot of discussion about it online, and I know everybody has their own opinions about it. I think there's drawbacks and benefits to doing it. Simply put, when we decided to remake Siege of Orison, within an instance, we wanted to see whether we could create a curated experience for four players. A linear mission flow that utilised not having any outside influence inside a mission, really for the first time, in Siege. We wanted to see if we could craft that in particular, and see whether we could pull it off: what we have, what we don't have, what we'd like in the future to perhaps make things like this, or things with a bigger party size.
And like I say, we could have made a bigger platform and increased the party size, tried to curate it for that many people. But we settled on four. We wanted to start with a group of four for this. I know it's not very similar to the old Siege.
I mean, the old Siege was completely unbalanced. We had no way of limiting it. So when we had built it originally, it was designed for 30 people. And then they found an issue where... Originally, we used to have two DGSs running on one server, and we found when we did Siege that they were fighting for resources. So instead, we were like, well, let's just have one DGS per Amazon server. So we did that. And then we were like, we can up the player count then. And then obviously that's when Siege came out, and we'd upped the player count to like 100 people. So it was instantly unbalanced on release. So it's nice to finally see it in a balanced form.