Google and Ubisoft Team Up to Improve Server Technology

For Honor recently had a fairly big change implemented by Ubisoft, who finally, finally listened to all of the game’s millions of fans begging for dedicated servers and went “Alright, fine, dedicated servers it is”. In making the switch, the game has improved noticeably in terms of connectivity and speed, making it far more playable than ever before. And while Ubisoft might have a bit of egg on its face for resisting the move for so long, apparently it’s been so convinced by the transition that they’re going to start evangelizing the user of servers.

By which I mean, they’ve decided to partner up with Google in order to improve server technology, which would in turn improve the performance of online games around the world, with some new tech called Agones. As Google explains:

“Many of the popular fast-paced online multiplayer games such as competitive FPSs, MMOs and MOBAs require a dedicated game server—a full simulation of the game world—for players to connect to as they play within it. This dedicated game server is usually hosted somewhere on the internet to facilitate synchronizing the state of the game between players, but also to be the arbiter of truth for each client playing the game, which also has the benefit of safeguarding against players cheating. Dedicated game servers are stateful applications that retain the full game simulation in memory. But unlike other stateful applications, such as databases, they have a short lifetime. Rather than running for months or years, a dedicated game server runs for a few minutes or hours."

Agones, an old greek word for “contest” or “gathering”, would, in summation, make games run faster, smoother, and safer when they connect. Just make everything better in general. It’s easy to get behind that, even if Ubisoft is the one at the helm of the project.

But hey, it’s open source. So that’ll be good.

No word on when this baby would launch but here’s hoping it’s sooner rather than later.