Call of Duty’s Blackout experimented with more players at the end of the beta

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s new battle royale mode Blackout concluded its beta on Monday afternoon, but not before trying to squeeze a few more players into every game first, bringing each match’s total players up to 100.

During the beta’s initial release on PlayStation 4, the number of players that could be in any one Blackout match was capped at 80. After the first day, and happy with the game’s performance, the developers at Treyarch increased the limit to 88 players and stayed there when it was released on Xbox One and PC on Friday, Sept. 14. This max capacity held until the beta reached its official end point, 1 p.m. ET, on Monday.

However, Treyarch announced on Twitter that the company would be extending the beta two more hours and increasing the maximum players to 100 in each match.

Increasing the player count in battle royale games has long been a problem, as the more players in each match, the bigger strain there is on servers, degrading the experience of each players’ game. For instance, in professional matches of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, such as the at this year’s PUBG Invitational, there were only 80 competitors in each match to help provide the players with the smoothest possible experience.

It’s clear that Treyarch was happy with the performance of Blackout when it was sitting at just 80 players, and again when it was at 88, leading it to give us all a little bit of time with 100 person matches. While Treyarch didn’t allow players too much time to play with the 100 player options, from our time with the game — in lobbies that were usually around the mid 90s — performance still seemed impressively smooth and easy to play, something that already sets Blackout apart from its competition.

While things seemed to run pretty smoothly with Treyarch’s 100-player limit, it’s still unclear what the final player count for each match will be when Blackout launches with the rest of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 on Oct. 12.