Ubisoft has confirmed that there will be no dedicated servers for Far Cry 3 when it launches on PC, reports PCGamesN.
"The online experience does not support dedicated servers," said community manager MSV-Vextor on Ubi's official forums.
"Of course we are not trying to kill the pc community," MSV-Vextor added after furious comments from the community. "We have simply decided on a different way of handling multiplayer. We weighed the different options against each other to see what worked best, and what we came up with worked very well even without DS's."
Far Cry 2 launched without dedicated servers, too, which caused a massive uproar.
Since the statement went up on the forum, people have kept on complaining which made MSV-Vextor respond to some of the concerns:
- "-With lobby games you get lots of lag" – That is entirely dependent on the host and if the game itself takes resources from the machine that could be better used to run a server. If the game is well optimized and the players have good connections, there is no problem.
- "-A DS has faster downloads on maps." – The maps are hosted in 'the cloud'. Same as in FarCry 2. They are not downloaded from the server itself.
- "-Stable ping." – Again, more dependent on the host's connection as well as the network architecture. The server being dedicated or not has less to do with that.
- "-Being able to kick/ban cheaters or idiots" – That's a decision relating to how we want to handle the game. We have anti-cheating mechanisms in place on PC – and on consoles there is a whole other set of problems for anyone who decides to try and cheat.
- "-Crashing lobbys, hosts disconnecting." – That's why we have something called "Host Migration" in place. It transfers the hosting role to another player automatically. It's quite fast too. Usually takes no more than a few seconds.
- "-Lobby games dies out much faster than games with servers." – I can't say anything about that, I have never in my gaming or professional career seen any statistics on that.
- "-Lobby games are easier to hack than dedicated servers. And are easier to play online with pirated copies" (Paraphrasing) – Well, yes and no. A dedicated server could be hacked to run without the help of the 'master servers'. A matchmaking system could be emulated, and then the clients would have to be patched in order to contact the pirated servers instead of the original ones. Each one of those presents their own challenges.
- PS. The decision to exclude dedicated server functionality was not taken based on concerns over PC piracy.
