Why Army of Two Global Play Is Off Limits

Wondering why those servers are more sparsely populated that you thought they'd be? EA explains all.

Players of EA's new buddy-play war game Army of Two (full review) may have noticed that the online servers aren't quite as populated as the healthy sales for the game would suggest they would be. There's a good reason for that.

EA confirmed this week that online play in Army of Two is territorially restricted on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, meaning those with the PAL version of the game in Europe, the Middle East and Africa are forced to play with other people in those regions.

According to Reed Schneider, a producer at EA Montreal, this was done to improve performance, which is linked to the shared character animations that need to be kept in lock-step during co-operative play.

"Because we have all these synchronized animations and the players are always doing things together, the only way to support that kind of model right now is to use a deterministic model for networking," Schneider said in a statement.

Schneider said that it was primarily the competitive multiplayer that was the bottleneck, because of the way connection speeds affect gameplay.

"If you're playing with someone in co-op, generally you're playing with a friend, so it's not so much of a problem to have a non-region locked game, but the problem comes when you go into vs. mode," he said.

"Unlike client server, in a peer-to-peer or deterministic model, the person with the worst connection brings everyone else down to their level. So you could have three people playing with a good connection and one person with a bad connection in another continent, and everyone is brought down to his level."

Schneider said that the team is working on removing the restriction. An EA spokesperson told Kikizo that this decision is confined to Army of Two and is not indicative of EA's online strategy going ahead.

So far, the gap in the game's repertoire doesn't seem to be hurting the game's sales. According to numbers from research firm Chart Track, Army of Two was the most popular game in the UK over the weekend.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo