Everyone is still excited for Ubisoft’s “For Honor.” And why wouldn’t they? It’s going to be a money-making machine, with Vikings, Knights and Samurai all vying in gritty, realistic combat to find out who is the ultimate, superior fighting machine. After bribing half the people that make a living off Twitch to play it ad nauseam all weekend, you’d expect Ubisoft was going all in and sparing no expense to see it succeed. At least, that’s what I thought. But, it’s Ubisoft, so I think they finally figured out how to ruin it for everyone once more. I’m not surprised, but I’m for damn-sure disappointed. Ubisoft is fantastic about utilizing misleading advertising before failing to deliver at launch. It’s just the way things are now, I suppose. It’s frustrating to see how such a potentially block-busting game is going to just putter into obscurity with the following things we’ve learned. First off, the anticipated couch co-op isn’t going to happen. That’s gone, so it will only be an online game. While that’s not necessarily game-breaking, I mean, we don’t always have friends or family over to play with, so it’s not the end of the world. But what is the thing that has me so wound up, you ask?
No. Dedicated. Servers. At all. Peer-to-peer only. So you mean to tell me that this game was released back in 1998, when dedicated servers weren’t a thing, and to play Doom or Quake online we had to connect to our friends’ computers. That’s what this is, right? How do you expect people to stream this, while utilizing peer-to-peer? As someone who has tried it on multiple occasions [with a pretty great internet connection], it’s taxing to say the least. The game’s so close to launch, but yet, there were no great hurdles on the horizon until now. I find it interesting that we’ve known about this stuff for about a month, when someone else broke NDA, and yet Ubisoft has done no damage control to stop people from raging. Did they just hope nobody read Reddit or 4chan, or any other news outlet? Or does Ubisoft simply not care? Is that it? Do they not remember how bad a flop The Division was? I have to know if Ubisoft simply doesn’t care about money, or their fans. Or maybe they care too much about money and think their fans are idiots.
Sure, they still have time to patch in servers, if they really want, but by that we mean… you know, a day one patch, and a lot of outsourced money. They should have been preparing servers for months, not just saying nothing and hoping we won’t notice how bad our connections in-game are. Latency is unacceptable in a game so focused on twitch combat reactions and fighting game counterplay. Come on, Ubisoft. You can do better.
