Killzone: Shadow Fall will soon be receiving a new stability patch to improve the multiplayer experience in the PS4 shooter. However, developer Guerrilla Games is taking a multi-faceted approach to improve the experience, from introducing new server locations to better match-making and grouping together players with similar connection quality.
Lead game tech Jorrit Rouwe explained on the dev’s blog how the patch would also reduce many of the laggy kills seen thus far. “To our surprise, we saw that the percentage was really dependent on the region. US-East showed 13% laggy kills, US-West 6%, and other regions around 4%.
“Moving some of our servers in the US-East region to a different data center resulted in the percentage of laggy kills on those servers decreasing by a whopping 10%. A similar move in the US-West region unfortunately didn’t yield any further improvements.”
“So why is this? The US has many different networks, and not all networks have ‘peering agreements’ (a direct connection between the two networks). This means that sometimes, packets have to take a detour to arrive at their destination. For some players in the US-East region, we would even see packets travel from the east coast to the west coast and back before finally arriving at our server. This obviously introduces a lot of undesired lag.
“All servers in the US-East region have been moved to the new data center, so players in this region should see an improvement.”
Guerrilla is also currently working on returning you to your own region if you happen to be playing cross-region when no games were available, investigating new server locations including one in Istanbul to improve performance in the Middle East and optimized clan match-making.