Are they going to add more players to D3?

[jamezlit]

A max of 4 players seems small to me. I want to play with as many friends as possible. Any word on them expanding it to 6 or 8?

[bazinga]

I hope to god they do, at the very least do it for PVP.

[snowieken]

I disagree. From what I've seen for the first 13 character levels, I think a party of 4 is perfect for the game and the setting. 6, let alone 8, would be overkill for me. I could live with five, if only just for the ability to have all characters in the party. But more would be too crowded.

On a more personal level, the more people in the party, the more chance of getting that god-awful douchebag ruining the entire experience...

[capnlarge]

I'm jealous that you have that many friends. I'm not sure I could name 8 ppl I'd want to be in a room with IRL.

[jamezlit]

Well. You will always have those douchebag players regardless of how many players there are. It wouldn't hurt to have a higher max number of players because you can always adjust the numbers players that are allowed into the game anyways.

[dragon457]

During development, didn't Blizz state they set the max at 4 so that things would run smoothly and not get too bogged down? I could have dreamed that, though.

Faster computers aside, just think back to DII multi-player. You had 8 people on screen, all running/casting/looting/shouting/flinging poo, and then you had any and all minions (necro, amazon, assasin, followers, etc.). It got stupid sometimes. Framerates would drop to abysmal levels and it made playing less than fun.

With the number of mobs on screen, all the spell and special effects (lighting, shadows, etc.), I think 4 players is plenty.

[Arcanae]

From my experiance, requests for larger number of maximum players typically comes from MOAR impulse, because there are max of 4 players, people are asking for more, if there were 6 max players, there would be inevitable requests for more, etc. 4 is a very fine number, the only reasonable request I've heard is for 5 max players due to five classes, obviously. Even with 4 players there are a lot of effects going on and the screen is quite crowded, I can't imagine what it would be like with 6 or 8 players. So, overall, no I do not think they should add any more possible players to the game.

As for will they do it, I don't think they will. I'm fairly certain that they didn't come up with the number of four players randomly, or by picking the number out of a hat. I'd be willing to bet they tested all possible options, more and less players then four, including eight, before finally settling with four players. That means that they found, through actual testing, that four player party simply works the best.

[Frosty_The_Snowman]

I don't know much about D3 yet, but from what I've seen on YouTube, Blizzard enhanced the skills visual effects, so I guess they don't want the screen to turn into a giant fireworks when 8 players are fighting together. Maybe there's also a performance reason for that, 3D games are much heavier to run than 2D games like D2.

Hey, D2 is 2D, D3 is 3D... ROFL, never noticed that ...

[Farkon]

6 wouldn't be too bad in my opinion, but, why not an option for when you're creating a quest or even joining to set the max limit?

[LuMpX]

I think they stated at a QA at BlizzCon 2011 that more people casting and fighting on screen just did not work. It was overcrowded with results similiar to D2 and that is something they definitely don't want.