14 DAY TRIAL // Gears of War fans were pleasantly surprised last week when the franchise's developer, Epic Games, announced that the next title, Gears of War 3, when it will eventually appear, will come with dedicated servers for the multiplayer mode, in order to eliminate the dreaded host advantage.
Gears of War fans were already sad after the company announced that the title was pushed back from its initial April 2011 release date to a much later fall one, but the reveal of the dedicated servers, as well as the multiplayer beta that will arrive soon, more than made up for it.
Now, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski has talked about the new dedicated servers, and how they will finally level the playing field for all of the people involved in the multiplayer mode.
According to him, dedicated servers will really help eliminate some of the lag associated with Gears of War's multiplayer mode.
"Well I think dedicated servers will be a huge help," said Bleszinski. "You can't always guarantee a perfect game in the wild though. I've had lag in [Halo] Reach, I've had lag in Call of Duty. Lag is a reality of the Internet when you have millions of people connecting.
"That said, as a developer, it's your job to do whatever you can to bulletproof a new game as much as possible and dedicated servers, again, will help that."
Bleszinski added: "It's more about online performance because when you have a client-server architecture with Gears, you have somebody hosting and that host has somewhat of an inherent advantage over everybody else, which becomes this big [negative] thing. Like, in Gears or in Counter-Strike, if somebody kicked your ass, you claimed they were wall hacking even though they weren't.
"And now if you win in Gears it's, "You have host advantage!" But by removing [client servers] you suddenly have a level playing field for everybody. We have a server farm that Microsoft is helping us out with, so people will have a level playing field."
Are you excited about the dedicated servers finally hitting Gears of War 3 when it will officially be released or were you happy with the regular multiplayer setup?