Well, I think that a lot of the concern they had with 64 players was gameplay based. There was talk of having multiple teams with "commanders". It sounded like battlefield.
However, after playing around with it, they backed off because it did not feel "UT like".
It still sounds to me like you are going to be bandwidth contrained vs. hardware at the high end. You can probably put together a decent 8 core system for $3-4k.