So it’s true – every cloud has a silver lining. The recent delay to Gears of War 3 has meant that Epic now has time to launch a multiplayer Beta, which it will be doing early 2011. Gears of War 3 will also have dedicated servers for its ranked and social matchmaking games, which should hopefully eliminate ‘host advantage’.
We recently went hands on with Gears of War 3’s ‘Beast Mode’ and found it to be one of the highlights of the Eurogamer Expo 2010. The graphics were good and the frame rate was solid as a rock so expectations for the finished product are high, what with an additional five months of polish.
Source: Shack News
MadJunkBoy
YEAHH!! I hate the host power!! glad they’ve got dedicated servers… hope the game is going to be awesome!!! CAN’T WAIT!!!
recommended4u.co.uk
Excellent news. Any ideas if you have to do something special to get into the beta like pre-order the game or something along those lines? I would probably punch a priest if it granted me access to that beta test ;)
citizeninsane45
I would happily punch a priest free of charge
recommended4u.co.uk
I was wondering how long it would take before someone said that. 11minutes, impressive ;)
recommended4u.co.uk
Also, if the punching thing works out can I have the beta code?
Dan Lee
Pretty sure it’s gonna be by way of a gears of war cosplay dance off :op
recommended4u.co.uk
Ace. I’ll get down the gym now and start working on getting my arms as big as small vehicles. The judges are bound to dig the authentic approach
bigwhiteyeti
I’m going to guess code in Xbox360 versions of Bulletstorm.
BlackWidowShirt
What are dedicated servers and why is everyone obsessed with them?
recommended4u.co.uk
Well, in Gears’ case, if two players run at each other with chainsaws rev’ing, the host would always win the duel due to a host advantage. The difference for the most part is next to non-existant (and I certainly didnt understand when loads of PC gamers cancelled their preorders of MW2 when non-dedicated servers were announced) but in situations like the one I mentioned a minute ago it can get pretty annoying
jikomanzoku
Basically your actions in an online game are dependant on how fast your computer can communicate with the server, which is measured as your ping.
If you are playing the game on the machine which is acting as the server/host obviously your actions are instantaneous as you are the host/server. This leads to an advantage for the person hosting the game as illustrated perfectly by recommended.
So what happens is both players try to chainsaw each other in the face, but as the host has a ping of zero, his action is always going to be registered by the server first.
Happens with bullets too, if you have for instance a ping of 50, which is brilliant, the host would still have a 50 millisecond window of advantage in which to kill you. Which if you’re both running around corners at close range with shotguns for instance, is quite a big advantage.
jikomanzoku
Generally speaking with dedicated servers too, it helps to ensure that everyones connection is as fast as possible as it’s a commercial internet connection used which will in all likelihood be a damned site faster than little Tommy’s 8mb connection from his house in Slough or America etc. Imagine MAG being hosted on domestic servers – no thanks.