Steam reviewers can be fickle people, but I find that games with negative reception elsewhere will generally have hyper negative reception on Steam, whereas middling games may skew more toward the positive side. That makes For Honor's Open Beta period a huge anomaly, as it landed firmly in the mixed category, with 67 percent positive reviews.
Of course, that's not where a major game, or any game for that matter, wants to be, but what can Ubisoft actually do to push For Honor into the stronghold of positive reviews? Well, using the old eyeball test, most negative Steam reviews seem to have one like complaint: peer-to-peer.
You can test this out for yourself. Use whatever filter you want in the negative reviews, be it most recent or most helpful, and the some variation of the phrases "peer-to-peer" or "dedicated servers" will be a mainstay of almost every review you read. In fact, some are negative literally only because of the peer-to-peer connection. A small sampling:
"Very fun. just needs one thing
dedicated servers."
"Good fighting mechanics and class variety, but peer-to-peer in a PvP game is no-no."
And, my personal favorite:
We experienced the same issues in the closed beta period, where connectivity issues posed were success-threatening. It's amazing to me that For Honor could wipe out easily half their negative press and negative user reviews with the simple addition of dedicated servers.
And, when I say simple, I know it's not a just a switch that one can flip from peer-to-peer to dedicated at any time. It's certainly a lot of work and, likely, expensive to set up dedicated servers, but that's the kind of hard work the is rewarded by positive fan and reviewer feedback. While it may not be simple to do, it's a simple concept to grasp: peer-to-peer servers make for an inherently flawed user experience, and a bad UX will lead to a bad review.
As I've said before, everything we've seen and played in For Honor suggests that the core gameplay is going to be truly enticing and innovative. That being said, if we have a hard time actually playing the game, we're never going to know, and it seems Steam users have picked up on that.
We'll have a much more authoritative take on For Honor, with special attention paid to its lack of dedicated servers, in the next few days. While review codes for the game were sent out last week, we won't be able to play the game until the actual launch time later today.
