Now, how that works in practice remains to be seen. It’s likely that Microsoft will adopt something similar to the systems employed by Frontier Developments to run Elite: Dangerous. The spacefaring game spools up multiple instances of each of its 400 billion star systems as needed, with roughly 30 or so players to each instance. That reduces network traffic and also helps mitigate griefing. When you want to connect with other players on your friends list, however, you need to “wing up” with them in order to drop into the same instance.