For Honor Developer Speaks Out on Network and Framerate Issues

As online multiplayer action game For Honor prepares for its second beta release (the first open beta), its developer has addressed some of the criticisms aimed at the first early release of the game, specifically its networking and framerate issues. Players of the first beta speculated that the game’s peer-to-peer (P2P) networking was able to be gamed, giving hosts a speed advantage, and attacked the console version for being locked to 30 frames-per-second.

Speaking to TechRadar, the game’s creative director Jason Vandenberghe revealed that For Honor does not use P2P as we know it, and that the networking system would give no player any “visual advantage”.

“One thing that is not entirely clear to people is that we don’t actually have a traditional peer to peer architecture,” Vandenberghe explained. “We have a new type of architecture that, while it’s sort of based on a peer to peer philosophy, is actually there in order for us to do this game with eight players active simultaneously and then these two hundred AI running at the same time.”

“The way that our network system is built is that it’s built around everything being 100% fair,” he said. “So what you’re seeing is what I’m seeing at the same time, there’s no visual advantage in the game.”

Vandenberghe did reveal, though, that he and his team would assess the P2P networking during the beta stage and revise it if necessary.

“We’ll just see moving forward how it kind of goes into the community, and if there are actual problems, then we’ll reassess and see what we need to do,” he conceded.

As far as the framerate lock on Xbox One and PS4 goes, Vandenberghe admits that it is symptomatic of trying to make a stable release for consoles.

“I would love to be in a situation where we could be in the best of all possible worlds, but at the end of the day we needed to make sure that the game was solid, always successfully hitting its locked framerate, no drops, no nothing…and the only way we could do that was at the framerate that we’re at,”

The next For Honor open beta is available from 9th-12th February for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.