PS4 – No Dedicated Servers on Flagship Killzone Series?

Last week, all of the major publications ran articles titled “Killzone Shadow Fall has Dedicated Servers.”  PS4 fans immediately took to the comment sections of these articles to praise this bit of news.  But while most readers seemed to only catch the headline and decided to run with it, there was another group of PS4 fans who were upset by the news.

 

Here is the official Killzone Shadow Fall answer to how their multiplayer network is structured. This comes from an interview with the Playstation Blog.

 

Killzone Shadow Fall has dedicated servers hosted in various regions around the world. These servers do not run the logic of the game – they only act as a hub between the clients, forwarding network traffic from one player in game to all other players in game. This allows people with a slower connection or strict firewall settings to play without issues. Almost all logic relating to you (e.g. moving, shooting and taking damage) runs on your local PS4, with only a very small portion of the game logic (i.e. mission/scoring logic) running on the ‘session master’, one PS4 in the game selected for its connection quality.

 

Head over to the Killzone community forums, and you’ll find more than a couple of threads where users are upset that they will not see true dedicated servers.  If one PS4 is selected for its connection quality, then it is not a dedicated server in the sense that most gamers tend to think about dedicated servers.  The system Killzone Shadow Fall will use is the system that many games already use.  Several players are comparing it to the KZ2 server situation.

 

How did KZ2 Servers work?

@shystie1 Both! KZ2 uses dedicated servers for match making, game handling, stat tracking and so on, and P2P for the actual combat part.

— Killzone (@killzone) May 27, 2009

@shystie1 Yes, it's dedicated server-based. During combat a lot of data is also communicated P2P. That doesn't make it host-based, though

— Killzone (@killzone) May 27, 2009

 

 

Is it important or meaningful that Sony’s flagship FPS doesn’t have true dedicated servers?  No.  The important part is that the game doesn’t lag online.  So far, the devs sound pretty confident on Killzone running smoothly online.  We won’t have a definitive answer until the game releases.  But I highly doubt they will screw the launch of Killzone up.

 

The biggest lesson, may be to actually read the article and not just assume that a headline perfectly sums up the contents of the story.

 

Sources:

Playstation Blog

VGN: Video Games and News