For Honour‘s handling of multiplayer is causing frustrations for some players as lag rears its head, ruining fights and disrupting matches in the online melee fighting game.
“It’s almost unplayable like this,” one Reddit poster said. “I’m lucky if I can play one complete game out of every three.”
“Finally able to join a game,” another said. “The Orochi in the other team is teleporting around the place.”
Lag is to be expected in online experiences, as player connection speeds vary, but For Honour is drawing particular scrutiny from its player base. The main source of concern centres on how the game handles its online matches. It does not use dedicated servers. All matches are handled on a peer to peer basis.
Peer to peer is one way that online games function. With peer to peer, there is no dedicated server tracking player information. Rather, an individual’s client is designated as the game’s host. While this is cheaper than having numerous servers, it has the potential to create more lag, particularly if the host does not have a great connection.
For the host, everything seems fine; for others, it can be a mess. This set up creates a lot of trouble for a game as technical as For Honour. Dueling relies of proper hit detection and fast player reflexes. If one player is advantaged over the other because of a better connection, the fight is hardly fair.
There are further issues. Any time a host leaves or their connection is disrupted, the game needs to either find a new host or reconnect to the old one. This pauses the entire match. In the video above, Battle(non)sense also found that the network lag between two players in For Honour is higher than most games at an average of 110 ms. These numbers will inflate even more based on how fast each player is sending data to the host. This means that the perceived lag between players can be quite high and affect the outcome of fights.
As the first video suggests, peer to peer games like For Honour are also more susceptible to cheating through the use of devices called lag switches. By throttling their internet connection, hosts can get free hits and clean movement on enemies. The host can be lagging all over the place for everyone else, but because the match is using their client to decide what is or isn’t a valid attack, they can still get in clean hits.
Kotaku has reached out to Ubisoft for comment about these issues, and w’ll update if we hear back.
Speaking from personal experience, I’ve focused exclusively on dueling in For Honour. It’s a lot of fun but the two player limit can demonstrate how hosts have certain advantages. In most cases, the matches seem fair. However, there are moments when either myself or my opponent was clearly benefitting from being the host. There are sudden pausing before I slam my sword into someone’s chest right through their guard, or attacks that magically reach into my dodge distance regardless of timing.
These moments of lag mar an otherwise exciting experience.
Comments
6 responses to “For Honor Players Claim To Be Troubled By Lag”
I have finished only 1 game of Dominion. To be honest I haven’t played that many (probably tried around 10), but I can’t be bothered anymore…
The only reason I didn’t buy For Honor was because of this very problem. When I played the closed Beta and even the open one I was unable to finish a match unless it was a duel simply because of connection issues. I even have steady NBN so I thought I was well off for an Aussie.
Really disappointing overall though. I hope they do decide to go with servers down the track. I would definitely pick this up in a heartbeat if they did that.
Brawl and Duel are where its at.
I haven’t had that many issues until yesterday, and only in Dominion. before that It was pretty smooth
There is a multiplayer mode?
I love Open Betas these days, especially ones so close to release. Obviously the publishers want to use them to build hype but its now at the point where the Betas are quite an accurate depiction of release product. I played one match of For Honor in the Beta and then match making fucked up, made my decision then and there.
As the player numbers drop the matchmaking will choke and splutter accelerating its decline.
Props to the devs for trying something new though.