We’ve been getting a lot of updates about Star Wars Battlefront lately. The newest one is cause for excitement. Yes, dedicated servers are coming for all the Rebel Alliance soldiers out there. According to Playstationlife.net’s article who did an interview with Jamie Keen. Who is a lead designer on the team. Considering the entire game is online only this is a huge plus. He had this to say.
We’ll still have dedicated servers. Absolutely. It’s one of the hallmarks of making sure we deliver an unparalleled online servers for the game.
What makes this so good is the fact that without dedicated servers you are hosting the game yourself or on someone else’s home internet. In the past this has meant all kinds of connection lag, server crashes, server switching, cheat kills, excruciating losses not caused by lack of skill and more.
These details prove that good things come to those who wait. It’s been a long road and the video game world has completely changed since the days of the first two Battlefront games. They were addictive and marketed well to star wars fans and new comers. Both games campaigns were short and almost completely made for multiplayer online play. As fun as the game was especially with Battlefront II‘s advanced AI was, the real fun was to be had online.
In today’s market where speed and skill are king and internet connection for gaming is beyond essential for PC or console gamers. There’s nothing worse than winding down from school or work to be hit with latency issues causing you more anxiety. So having dedicated servers is a must. Unless you want your time in a galaxy far far away make you scream at your tv and want to rage quit every time you play online. No home connection was made to host a Star Wars duke out.
One of the most important aspects of competitive and ranked gaming is balance which is why fine tweaking the character and weapon balance is one of the most common updates available in any multiplayer versus games. You can’t expect to have people continue playing your game if lag gets in the way when your entire ranking system is based on assumed equality.
Hopefully Dice has learned from other companies mistakes who did not think dedicated severs were a big deal. Probably the most noteworthy controversy is from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 where the console version had dedicated servers and the PC version did not causing everything from a 200,000 large petition, to bad reviews, to lost revenue, and most importantly disgruntled gamers. Even future Call of Duty games had server issues with P2P and lagging servers on both console and PC version. Before finally giving in on newer iterations. This will not be the case for Battlefront.
Just remember, most the time you won’t be able to blame the lag for your lost matches. Also any lag experienced is probably on your end. So get ready to laser blast and lightsaber as fast as your fingers can fly. Because with dedicated servers you can now happily game away as long as you have a decent connection without any concerns for latency and internet related game play issues.