How do some games like Monster Hunter, or even mobile games like Underlords, allow for players all over the globe to play together seamlessly but other games like Dota has horrible lag and ping when you play outside your region?

Question

How do some games like Monster Hunter, or even mobile games like Underlords, allow for players all over the globe to play together seamlessly but other games like Dota has horrible lag and ping when you play outside your region?

In: Technology

Answer 1

ELI5: Monster Hunter World has plenty of lag issues because its an action game that relies on fast host connections to synchronize it to where the rest is simulated locally so you FEEL like there’s no lag. A simple frame analysis of a game can reveal that there is lag if you are not the host. Connecting across regions will also reveal lag.

Underlords appears to have very little lag because of the following:

1. Turn based game so updates can be preloaded and readied locally after being received.
2. Dedicated servers which can handle what a peer to peer host would usually need to.

This gives it lower latency because you don’t need to worry about a host with limited bandwidth. Also the amount of data being sent is already very small. Plus you don’t need to rely on host CPU, the server takes care of that too.

Now there’s another comment with technical information on how the different netcode approaches allow for synchronization. This is more important when we talk about a real-time game that requires precision information being shown simultaneously to both players. Like Starcraft 2, or Counterstrike GO. Basically PVP games. To be sure, those implementations are very good, but not perfect. You need to be on LAN, which means local network, to have near perfect sync. This is because there is no longer that ping lag time between each packet sent to the server/host and then back to you.

If you want to go even FURTHER you need to take a look at Fighting Game synchronization. In these games the sync must be as close to FRAME perfect as possible. I recommend looking up Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V netcode implementation. Here they will employ rollback systems or “frame delay” which means how many frames it takes for a single input to register. Its basically artificial lag to help adjusting for real lag…much to players chagrin.

If somehow in the future everyone has very low latency halfway across the world, lag will become a thing of the past as a common complaint.