They are having a lot of network and matchmaking errors, especially on the pc side of things. Hopefully they get it tuned up. They have been hotfixing several times a day on their side of things. My experience on the XB1 has been very smooth today after a pretty rocky start yesterday.
I tried to play this tonight on PC.
2 games ended instantly in errors. 1 game got through one round before the other guy dropped out mysteriously.
I am not amused. I do not recommend this game to anyone on PC until, and unless, they resolve these problems.
FWIW I discovered that turning off my VPN fixed the network problems and I was able to play the beta on the PC with my friend no problems. We ended up getting it for the PS4 though, so far it seems fine, although I haven’t had much chance to play.
This was mildly amusing for a day during the beta, but I’m skeptical that I’d find it interesting long term.
There also seemed to be a bunch of microtransactions in it? And someone said he got it for free with Twitch or something? Is this game going to eventually be F2P?
Some stuff about it was interesting, but ultimately I felt like it ended up being kind of shallow. Maybe I just didn’t play it enough to fully appreciate it.
I feel almost like part of the issue is that you can switch sides you’re attacking/blocking on (which is, to be honest, a somewhat interesting mechanic) instantaneously, without any sense of inertia or momentum. I feel like if there was some more “weight” to this shift, that combat might be more interesting? But it might also be terrible. I dunno.
Some of the classes seemed very strong, like the morningstar/shield class, while some seemed absurdly terrible, like the spear class.
I thought it was okay, but from what I saw in the beta, there’s no way I’d pay full retail for it.
Of course, I have no idea what the SP is like, but I doubt it’s going to be a meaty story-driven affair with unique levels.
I haven’t had a game tilt me this much in a long time, and it feels really bad and I regret buying it. Between the input lag (the “inner” block icon showing my mouse is in a direction but the game not registering the block’s movement), the lack of balance (orochi and warden), and the horrible, fucking abysmal lack of matchmaking (being matched against people who have no-life-prestiged whatever fuckin’ hero they’re on because the game gives up trying to put you with people near your “level” after 7 seconds), I’m done. Nevermind peer-to-fucking-peer.
Maybe it’ll be playable in 6-8 months or however long it took Siege to start making a comeback. Or it’ll die because they’re unwilling to make changes.
Here’s an interesting review:
A gaming buddy bought this and was telling me a bit about his experiences. He echoes the feeling that it’s pretty cool for thirty bucks, not so much for sixty. He’s also using an Xbox controller, which he says makes the fighting more responsive. The idea sounds interesting but the combination of price, game modes, and me not trusting Ubisoft to actually deliver all the bells and whistles like campaigns, meaningful multiplayer, etc. make this a no-go for me. I still remember The Division, and Mankind Divided, thank you very much.
And just like a fighting game, your experience will be a lot more fulfilling if you have a friend to spar with for 3 hours straight. For the rest of us,…
The bots are good.
I didn’t play beta so i’ve had a lot of learning to do. I do a lot of AI matches, specifically how to play bot level 1 and eventually level 2. Also Duels against AI. Level 3 bots are insanely strong if you’re feeling gutsy.
After i get comfortable with a class i move on to 1vs1 duels against players. I also tend to leave after the end of games every time (even if i win), just because i prefer playing against different classes/people.
This has worked pretty well for me learning lawbringer, quitting it after getting fed up with the class and then moving to conqueror.
Peer-to-peer connections Ubi? Really?
You can’t have a host if it’s P2P. There is a lot of semi-truths in the video. They complain it’s p2p, then talk about it selecting a new host. In addition the network method they chose with For Honor isn’t affected by lag switches.
There are plenty of arguments you could make against the system they chose to use, but I get tired of seeing people using information that doesn’t mean what they think it means.
Also fwiw I almost never get disconnected on the console version, that seems to be a problem on the PC side more. I did get a lot of disconnects on the PC tech test though.
I think in general these days when people refer to P2P, they don’t mean actual peer-to-peer, but are instead referring to server-client where one of the players is the server, instead of there being dedicated servers. Around the turn of the decade those two things got mixed up in popular gaming culture and then never really got untangled after that.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but peer to peer in this context is generally used to refer to a situation where one of the players’ machines is used as a host, rather than a separate, dedicated host which they all connect to.
You are right in that is what most gamers are thinking when they say P2P, but P2P is a real thing that isn’t that. Having said that, the irony here is that For Honor actually does use something more like P2P than the client/server model of player as host that people are saying is P2P. The whole thing is just a bunch of the wrong terms being thrown around and it feels like more than semantics since all of the terms have actual specific meaning in the same context as intended.
Link describing what system they use
What makes it even worse is that even Ubisoft uses the wrong terms throughout describing what they are using. They have some weird hybrid of P2P and traditional Client/Listen Server.
Please keep in mind I’m not defending their decision to use the model they did, I just think most of what is in that video is disingenuous.
Having played the game all weekend, the multiplayer feels half-baked. Constant errors searching for games, kicked out of games and losing points, etc. The technical details in the video may be wrong, but they’re right that the situation is a mess.
On PC, the connection issues are a real problem.
My experience is similar running on the PS4. Very little networking problems, although sometimes it takes much longer than I’d like for a match to startup. I had a lot of network problems on the PC during beta, although as I noted above, those mostly went away when I turned off my VPN.
Yes, just to keep stating the obvious, P2P is not necessarily a bad choice and it can be very resilient to hacking, specially in 3+ player setups where hacking in a player’s advantage can be really difficult to achieve (saturating another player’s connection, that is, forcing them to drop, is a different issue and hard to protect against).
Reading whatever little Ubisoft has exposed of their netcode, I would be mostly wary of how the arbitration service is implemented (on the surface, it’s weird they mainly use a post-match arbitration instead of using democratic arbitration between machines while the match is running, so whatever).
P2P can lead to connection problems, though, specially with certain VPNs setups and some routers, although they probably are using a relay server in those cases (and I would speculate maybe in consoles they default to relay servers). Also, P2P has stricter network requirements that pure client-server. A computer that has few issues with a good client-server implementation might find her connection unstable when there’s no server to help. In P2P you also perceive as much other player’s connection issues as yours, while in client-server that’s easier to mitigate, so the problem might be perceptual to an extent.
P2P scales really well and mitigates some problems client-server architectures have at launch, but it brings its own issues, so it’s a tradeoff. But that video is mostly nonsense.
https://youtu.be/Zm-jtdgFgXs
Got lucky and wanted to share the results. Still firmly believe revenge gear is cancer to the game, but we’ll see if they bring it down a notch. For what it’s worth I’m not using much of it in favor of other stuff.