For Honor
Medieval fighting game For Honor is finally adjusting its ambitious and controversial online system and adding dedicated servers. The move, announced today, follows months of player complaints that the online-only fighting game’s connectivity issues made it too frustrating to play.
For Honor players have that matchmaking, on average, takes 45 seconds, but personal experience and dozens of comments from Kotaku readers indicate that, anecdotally, matchmaking wait times can be upward of two or three minutes.
Back in March, thousands of For Honor players actually threatened to boycott the game, forcing Ubisoft to address their complaints over server issues, balance and combat glitches.
The reason why For Honor‘s online system felt shoddy wasn’t because publisher Ubisoft made a shoddy online system. Their network engineers faced some major challenges and dealt with them creatively — but maybe a little too ambitiously. “Making 4v4 fighting work over a network — it’s really special, because your exact position is much more important, and your timing is much more important than in a shooter,” For Honor game director Roman Oriola told Eurogamer.
For Honor‘s online system is different from a traditional peer-to-peer server, which often has a “host” player simulating a server. In For Honor, instead of one player acting as the “host,” all of the players will be constantly receiving and sharing data from each other’s systems. So nobody has “host advantage” and, allegedly, there should be more “reactivity.” Every player receives the inputs of all other players locally on their system. From those inputs, the game can simulate every fighter’s movements.
For Honor
If everybody playing had perfect internet connections, For Honor‘s network might be a groundbreaking success. But that’s not the case. “When there is a little bit of lag, or when somebody has a frame-rate drop, that adds to the load of calculation of what’s happening for each frame,” Oriola told Eurogamer. “So not only does it have to recalculate everything that is happening for all the people who are sending him information, but also it needs to backup on the things he missed because he was lagging or behind in terms of frame-rate. That’s the issue we are facing.”
Now, the people behind For Honor say they’re rolling out several improvements to the game, including dedicated servers. Looks like their current network situation isn’t viable for the game’s long-term health. “In conjunction to the dedicated server implementation, enhancing peer-to-peer stability and matchmaking remain priorities for the team,” the press release reads.
Other new content includes two new seasons, competitive play with duel tournaments, ranked 4v4 and a more intense training mode for veteran players. When asked when the server change will be implemented, a For Honor representative did not give a timeline, adding that “switching to dedicated servers is a big task.”
The change is curious because even Oriola said that “If we were working on dedicated servers, we would have the same issues we have today.” Hopefully, For Honor‘s developers have found a way around that.
Comments
8 responses to “For Honor Is Finally Getting Dedicated Servers”
Cool, maybe I’ll finally buy it.
Had this been announced at launch I would of got it but I don’t want to have to take out a mortgage to be on an even level with all the players.
This game cops alot of hate and the community is very salty, the devs have been doing alot to keep everyone happy. I’d advise any considering it to ignore the hate and give it a shot. Just be prepared to be smashed for a few rep levels 😛
Well, Ubi turned things around with Rainbow Six Siege… Maybe they can pull it off with this too.
Keen to see.
Is it just me or does the tone being used imply that player hosted servers are some kind of phenomenal new advance in server tech? Wasn’t call of duty doing this back in the day? If you went back further, didn’t Neverwinter nights and commandos 2 also do it?
Now that the game is dead, here’s something that should have been included from the start!
i loved playing the game at my mates, but didnt see much value in it beyond the casual slog. all i really see here is ubisoft paying a graphic designer for a promising and pretty looking roadmap that we may never get to see fulfilled.
still waiting for division year 2 content lol
Fuck this game. Friends wanted to buy it, I said wait a bit it’s Uni trash, so I bought it..
The gameplay is semi-trash too. Highly dependant on levels. Easy nuking by pushing off ledges.
Go ahead, try out single player and how much reaction time you have to dodge a shove. <0.5sec. With no lag.