There is an excellent interview up at Gamasutra with Insomniac Games CEO, Ted Price. They caught up with him at a community event at their headquarters in Burbank, Ca. I really enjoy reading these in-depth interviews as it gives me a chance to get into the mind of some of the leaders in the game industry today.
Excerpt-
Designing multiplayer has got to be a big challenge; when you’re talking about the numbers, eight for co-op is a big number, and 60 for competitive multiplayer is a ridiculous number, so… Has that been a real challenge?
TP: Well, when we began designing for Resistance 2 on the multiplayer side, we experimented with a lot of ideas. And Skirmish evolved from a lot of experiments that didn’t quite work. We ended up kind-of having a “eureka!” moment at one point with the Skirmish mode, when we were faced with the unfortunate reality that just putting 60 players in a big arena doesn’t work. It’s just not fun!
And so, the design and multiplayer programming team got together and just figured out how to make the dynamic objective system and the squads work well. But it was a painful process, for sure, and we went through many iterations to actually get it right.
The Gamer Report 