Rebellion wants you to know they aren't stupid :)

[-Snafu- 77]

Its not anywhere in the future and you dont need an "excellent" conection either. GTA IV thru GFWL does it already for quite some time now.. P2P works great.

Passing data back and forth betwean clients using a server doesnt make sense anymore, its a thing of the past.

There are ofcourse interests in keeping dedicated servers going.. a popular online shooter like MW2 would generate huge 3rd party profits if it required dedicated servers for online play..

A simple online shooter doesnt even transfer that much data, you have people running around in a arena blasting around..

I agree with Mr. Carmack :) .

Bottom line is that you do need a good connection, hence why MW2 is a lag fest most of the time. Saying otherwise flies in the face of all the complaints. Most people do not have a good internet connection and it will be a long time before people do. In addition to that most areas do not have access to new high speed internet as the infrastructure does not exist. I live next to an important city and the internet services advertised by companies aren't even available to me, and it's almost 2010. I have to settle for these crap packages that cost a lot more and are a lot slower.

[Pyronick 21]

John Carmack has always had strange and sometimes mind boggling opinions regarding the future of gaming in general. If i remember right when dedicated GPU cards were being released, Carmack wasn't exactly keen on such a thing but eventually grew to accept them (as did everyone else), and of course he was never a fan on Aegia's technology with PhysX, and while having a dedicated PhysX card wasn't the best idea, Nvidia integrating them into their new GPU's I think is a good step forward. The idea is to take the processing stresses off of the CPU, and no matter how powerful CPU's get, games will always try to wear them out with more and more processes. This is why every year or two we get a new game that just tears into hardware.

I guess he had a valid reason to believe that.

I share his opinion. I hate proprietary "standards", they tend to increase pricing and halt progression.

Physics offloading to a GPU (or DSP or even a dedicated physics chip) is of course good progress, unless it can only be used on graphics hardware from a specific brand which overprice their stuff.

[TheReddog 0]

I've played GTA IV with ppl from the US, Russia and even Brazil, now thats a complex game, with data streaming constantly, a.i, physics, vehicles and large draw distance, the netcode is really good.

Now today we have multiple core cpu's, several GB of ram and optic fiber spreading out.

Do you really think we will need dedicated servers to play a simple fps in the future?

Because thats what MW2 and AVP are, simple FPS games.

I agree with Carmack.

I've played GTA IV with people around the world as well, in fact here in Australia it almost never match makes me with someone in the same country. In this time I experienced everything from horrendous warping to people dying 10+ seconds after you had shot them in the face. It was utterly horrid and only reaffirmed my choice never to pay for XBL.

Oh and before you say it I was using 30MB Cable at the time.

P2P was abandoned for PC Games years ago for very good reasons. The only reason it is returning to PC is because developers want to spend as little time as possible making cross platform games. I also get the feeling these days developers want to kill off the modding scene, no dedicated servers makes it very hard to grow a community and mod for a game, these days rather than giving a game longevity they want to take your money and then have you purchased next years model again and again.

P2P is inferior to Dedicated Servers in every aspect.