Ubisoft, why are you doing this to us? No seriously, why? It’s not like we love publishing such articles about your games. Seriously, some of Ubisoft’s games have a lot of potential. However, the French company – or rather, Massive Entertainment in this particular case – did not go the extra mile in order to take care of the PC version.
Tom Clancy’s The Division is an MMORPG. It’s the new Destiny if you like. Therefore, one would expect its netcode to be a top priority for Massive Entertainment, especially after what happened during its beta phase. Unfortunately, its netcode remains a complete mess and according to Glenn Fiedler – who has spent nearly five years as lead network programmer at Sony Computer Entertainment – Massive Entertainment will have to rewrite the entire netcode in order to protect PC gamers from hackers.
As Glenn wrote on his blog:
“Here we have a client-side cheat program that is poking memory locations and giving players infinite health, infinite ammo, and teleporting players around the level.
This indicates that The Division is most likely using a trusted client network model.
I sincerely hope this is not the case, because if it is true, my opinion of can this be fixed is basically no. Not on PC. Not without a complete rewrite.”
This does not really surprise us. The beta build of Tom Clancy’s The Division suffered from the very same issue, something that Massive Entertainment promised to fix. It appears that it hasn’t and the reason. Why you ask? But because the netcode may need to be completely rewritten in order to fix such an issue.
Glenn concluded:
“If a competitive FPS was networked the other way, with client trusted positions, client side evaluation of bullet hits and “I shot you” events sent from client to server, it’s really difficult for me to see how this could ever be made completely secure on PC.
I’m rooting for the dev team on this one and I sincerely hope really they can turn it around.
I hope they’re not using a trusted client networking model. I hope they have something up their sleeves. I hope they have a valid networking approach based around server-side checks that can address this issue in some way…
But unfortunately, so far, all signs point to no”
Thanks Eurogamer
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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