We’ve been building Edge of Chaos, a large-scale multiplayer experience and recently hit a major milestone: running a live test with 13,000 concurrent characters in a single shard using UE5!
Traditionally, scaling multiplayer to even a few hundred players comes with major hurdles: networking limits, visibility handling, and engine bottlenecks. Most solutions either require heavy infra or struggle with performance beyond small groups.
For this playtest of our Dominion mode, which was limited to 20 players on one server, we managed to take this to 13,000 players still on a single server using Quark! We couldn’t believe it. While the backend handled it with ease, we had to do quite a bit of custom work on the engine side to get Unreal to perform under those conditions, especially with 100–200 characters in each player’s vicinity.
Key optimizations we used in UE5:
- GPU-instanced character animations via Skelot
- Efficient material setup using master materials and texture atlases
- Aggressive use of multithreading and logic partitioning
With these in place, Quark Engine kept things running smoothly at scale. We’re confident it can handle much more as we bring in more players or expand our cloud test capacity (those UE5 headless nodes add up!).
Quark Multiplayer is now in Early Access (granted upon review), with a public SDK coming soon. Try it here: Quark Engine
Would love to hear your thoughts or experiences tackling large-scale multiplayer in UE!