For Honor was once hailed as the best upcoming new IP, and a potential game-changer on the competitive multiplayer scene. From what I played at PAX West, it appeared to be the genuine article – tapping into a new market while ingeniously using a familiar formula at the same time.
But, just as its praise hit a high-mark, the bad news started to roll in. First there was the social-life-crushing announcement that For Honor will not have split-screen functionality, dealing another blow to the already-unconscious feature of couch co-op (call the fight, already).
Then, last week, the news of For Honor's always-online requirement gave another wave of bad press to Ubisoft Montreal. But this week's bombshell may be the boiling point: For Honor will not have dedicated servers, with competitive multiplayer functioning on a peer-to-peer basis.
I won't extol the virtues of dedicated servers over peer-to-peer – mostly because it's 2016 and will be 2017 when For Honor comes out, so I shouldn't have to – but suffice it to say that a game like For Honor that requires precise timing and reaction to your opponent's moves in real time would be far better off on dedicated servers.
A tester even broke NDA to show everyone the issues he ran into in the recent Alpha testing period for PC.
It's worth noting that a test like this is bound to have errors, since they're still developing the logistics of For Honor, but it's certainly not a positive sign, and several Alpha tests as of late went off without a hitch (Battlefield 1, for example).
And the conversation about whether or not these issues should or should not be present in an Alpha overlooks the fact that, at best, For Honor is going to be an always-online, peer-to-peer multiplayer game without split-screen. If that was on the descriptor when I played the game at PAX, I'm certain my reaction, and the reactions of many others, would have been far less positive.
Of course, it's not all negative. It's recently been announced that For Honor will include a course of free DLC, which is always nice to see, and the game still boasted impressive balance in the early stages. But all of that seems to be just a silver lining on a big, dark cloud that is only growing bigger and darker.
Imagine this: if you heard an advertisement say "For Honor – the always-online, peer-to-peer multiplayer game that you can only play with your friends if they also own a copy. Coming 2017," would you have pre-ordered it?
