When Epic announced Gears of War 3 had been moved from April into fall 2011, you could hear folks hopes shatter around the globe in a massive wail of despair. Well, our wail of despair was loud enough for everyone, we reckon.
However, after the dust settled, it was clear there was a very good reason for the delay: a beta, and dedicated servers. According to Cliff Bleszinski, the addition of dedicated servers will provide “a level playing field for everybody” and that is good news indeed.
Speaking with 1UP, Bleszinski also said Epic plans on addressing lag issues as well, and dedicated servers should help with the issue.
“[Dedicated servers] are more about online performance because when you have a client-server architecture with Gears, you have somebody hosting and that host has somewhat of an inherent advantage over everybody else, which becomes this big [negative] thing,” he said.
“Like, in Gears or in Counter-Strike, if somebody kicked your ass, you claimed they were wall hacking even though they weren’t. And now if you win in Gears it’s, ‘You have host advantage!’ But by removing [client servers] you suddenly have a level playing field for everybody. We have a server farm that Microsoft is helping us out with, so people will have a level playing field.
“There will still be instances where somebody who has great bandwidth will be allowed to host for other players. But it’s a situation now that we can detect how good their upstream or downstream is; we detect what the pings are and we decide if it’s an appropriate scenario. Otherwise, just go dedicated.
“Dedicated servers will be a huge help [with lag]. You can’t always guarantee a perfect game in the wild though. I’ve had lag in Reach, I’ve had lag in Call of Duty. Lag is a reality of the Internet when you have millions of people connecting. That said, as a developer, it’s your job to do whatever you can to bulletproof a new game as much as possible and dedicated servers, again, will help that.”
As far has how fans can get into the Gears of War 3 beta, Bleszinski said Epic is unsure how it’s to go about it just yet, but it’s scheduled for sometime in early 2011.
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