Ubisoft has finally taken the step to introduce dedicated servers to For Honor for console players and early reports suggest it has made a massive difference to the game's performance. Lag seems to now be a thing of the past if you have a good connection and the game no longer stutters or comes to a halt if someone leaves. In short, it seems to be the gameplay experience many For Honor fans hoped they would have when they first picked up the game a year ago.
Previously, For Honor leveraged peer to peer servers, which had problems right from the start. All it would take was a host located on the other side of the world, running a VPN, or with a dodgy connection and matches became lag fests. Worse yet, if the host were to die and decided to leave rather than stay in the game, then the whole match would stop while the host was migrated to one of the other players.
It was a hugely misguided step for Ubisoft, especially for a company of its size. However, that's what it did and players languished with peer to peer servers for over a year. That's likely a major contributor to why For Honor's player base shrank by such huge margins, though purportedly there are still a good few thousand regular players which keep it ticking over.
Kotaku reports that general user response to this update has been positive, with many claiming it's been refreshing to get through a match without connection problems or lag. However, it's still not perfect. The loss of time snapping which looked to synchronize players with differing connection latencies has meant that there is a distinct advantage to those with better pings. It's meant that the faster characters are even faster than before, making slower characters with heavier attacks a little redundant in comparison.
No word yet on when we can expect a fix for that.
