Multiplayer bedlam got you down? Endless cross-map sniping bumming you out? Insomniac Games honcho Ted Price feels your pain and he's doing his best to fix some of things that often plague the best of multiplayer shooter matches.

He has to. Resistance 2 online play will support up to 60 players on one map, and without some way of sorting through some of those problems the matches just wouldn't be any fun to play.

If you really don't care about the confusion of such a mighty match, if you revel in the disorder, you can still play the matches you want, but for the rest of us Price and his team has some pretty neat ideas.

As he announced in Europe, Resistance 2 will feature a multiplayer mode that breaks those 60 gamers into smaller squads. While the matches I saw and played through featured ten squads of six, Price said that other size squads will also be used in the game.

While the members of the squad don't have to stick together, they do spawn together and it pays to stick to your group. Once spawned, the game's AI looks at the larger battle taking place on the map and issues automatic orders to your and your squad, marking your new objective on the map with a star in a circle.
Objectives can include taking a control point, defending an area, even coming to the rescue of another squad under heavy fire or taking out one particular member of an opposing squad.