14 DAY TRIAL // When Infinity Ward first announced that Modern Warfare 2 wouldn't support dedicated servers, the PC community was in an uproar. Along with other decisions regarding the game that were seen by the PC gamers as a stab in the back, it ended up with PC sales amounting to only three percent of the total. Be it because it actually felt like the PC had been taken a notch down as far as developer attention went, or because this was just seen as a golden marketing opportunity, DICE was very vocal about its disapproval of the “no dedicated servers” concept.
While trying to not lash out at someone else's product as much as it could, the Battlefield developer made it very clear that its game wouldn't follow the same road as MW2. It promised that Bad Company 2 would be a proper PC experience, with large servers and support for dedicated ones. Now, while talking to Eurogamer, Bad Company 2's Producer, Gordon Van Dyke, has detailed these servers, and the first thing he has revealed is that the files that the community will need in order to build dedicated servers won't be released, in an attempt to “protect the game's integrity on PC.”
As such, the only way to host a dedicated server for BC2 will be to rent one from DICE's authorized hosts. According to Van Dyke, “This does not earn DICE a profit. But we will see where the game goes and support it post launch.” As for the hosts themselves, these have been picked in “all major regions of the world,” so, unless you're in one of them, don't expect to have a perfect, lag-less BC2 multiplayer experience.
Truth be told, this isn't that much of a difference from the previous workings of other Battlefield games. While DICE did offer the choice to host the server in one's own living room, very few players did, and servers were still rented to ensure a constant, quality connection. The problem here would be more of an ideological one. DICE promised to fully support the PC community, but it has already announced that mod tools won't be released for the game, and now it has even restricted the server freedom, in a world where anarchy rules.
The restricted files are bound to be leaked sooner rather than later, and DICE should know this, so we have to wonder just what it is trying to achieve by restricting them in the first place. While it's still far from Modern Warfare 2, BC2 seems to slowly but surely move in the same general direction.