By now most readers will know that I am hooked on Firewall Zero Hour. It was my personal 2018 Game of the Year, and for good reason: it’s simply the best multiplayer game available for the PlayStation VR. That’s not to say that it is perfect, mind you, as it does have its fair share of problems, even more so now that there’s a new wave of contractors joining in the fun after receiving PSVR headsets for Christmas.
Common complaints centre around the game’s use of P2P (peer-to-peer) matchmaking instead of dedicated servers. When a game uses P2P for online play, one player effectively becomes the hosting server, and if that player leaves the game ends. This has always been a nuisance in Firewall Zero Hour, but with the influx of new players who lack the patience to see a game through once they’ve been killed, it’s resulting in more host disconnects than before. Speaking from personal experience, this has become a massive problem since Christmas with around a quarter of the games I’ve played ending early due to the host abandoning the game early.
Naturally, dedicated players have been complaining on the Firewall Zero Hour Reddit page. The complaints aren’t falling on deaf ears. One of the development team has taken the time to answer fan questions around matchmaking issues, updates, new features and so on.
First up, what the developers are doing behind the scenes:
“We are planning on adding and improving as many of the comfort features as possible while adding new content. We are totally committed and welcome all the feedback and ideas that actually help us improve the game. We listen to everything and have already added many ideas from the community with many, many more to come. We always try to prioritize features between must fixes and low hanging improvements to new features. There is a lot to do and some features / improvements are huge, we have a plan for most things and test ideas out daily. Please hang in there, I assure you that your patience will pay off.”
It sounds like we all just need to be a little patient. I’m normally quite sceptical when a developer promises anything but I’m giving First Contact Entertainment the benefit of the doubt. We’ve seen improvements come, albeit slowly, but it shows the developer is good to its word.
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Next up, why the studio doesn’t spill the beans early on new features:
“That’s a good question. I’d love to tell you but I can’t and here’s why. If we mention a feature that we are working on or planning and for some reason it can’t be done, which could be due to cost or system limitations or both then when we don’t do it everyone gets very angry for saying one thing then not delivering. Not only do we have to make sure we don’t say things that won’t happen to protect our reputation we also have to make sure we don’t promise anything on Sony’s behalf. They are our partner in this and have learned this lesson before so are very cautious of it. This is why we have to be very careful when we even mention any new features. Basically we can’t talk about them until we have 100% guarantee that we can deliver it. Not only do we have to confirm on the developer side but also for servers which live under Sony. There is a lot of testing that has to be done to guarantee a feature works before we can promise it as you could imagine. The current server situation isn’t perfect but it works, if we were to release a new system but it broke then it could be the end of the game. So, this is why we have to be a little vague, but what I can say is there is very little we read that we aren’t already aware of and in most cases already working on and testing. And that is not stopping anytime soon. Should you buy the game? That’s up to you but it is an amazing experience now and is only going to get better and a smoother experience over time.”
Basically, the developers won’t announce any new features until it is guaranteed to be released. And that makes sense, really, as it’s always disappointing for players to hear that features and updates will come, only for them to quietly be abandoned later on. Like GTA V’s single player DLC. Rockstar did have plans for such a thing, but then the publisher realised it could sponge more money out of GTA Online, so the announced single player content was quietly shelved with Rockstar and Take Two denying it was ever announced (it totally was and the internet doesn’t forget).
It’s in the studio’s and Sony’s best interests to keep the players happy; if the playerbase drops away, nobody will be buying the paid-for trinkets and cosmetics and the game will die a slow death – nobody wants that, do they?
