PS4 Own lobby hosting

[Bobr-Polsky]

Hello, will we ever get own lobby hosting for consoles ? I want to play with my friend, but i see no option for creating own lobby, only dedicated servers. Unfortunately on dedicated servers we cant add or remove bots or change their difficulty :(

[DC_vipeout]

This is Steam forum and PS4 build is off topic, so keep in mind that mods may remove this thread.

That said, we've tried to give that functionality to consoles as well. Problem is, consoles are too weak. When you host your own lobby, you host it on your local machine. On PC's this turned out not to be a problem. Yes, you loose a few FPS, the clients may lag a bit because you're not a full up dedicated server machine, but generally it's ok. Worst case scenario one of the friends with a better PC is the host and everyone is happy.

On consoles it turned out that the server-side code is just too heavy to keep the game at a playable rates. Few frames of FPS on consoles means cert fail, so we couldn't do that. We could have that on the more powerful console versions (Pro and X), but that's also not allowed by the console makers. We can make the game prettier, but we cannot exclude any major features from the cheaper consoles, and a private lobby would be major.

Other companies go around the issue by creating the "private, own" lobby, not really own, but still on the dedicated machines as all other servers, just with special access for the creator. That turned out to be a lot of work that we haven't anticipated and as such couldn't be made within our budget and time constraints.

Originally we believed that it would be possible to add that feature in after the release. Unfortunately due to the mess with PC GOG port, we had no time for MANY and I mean MANY planned functionalities across all platforms. This was one of those that just had to be cut out.

[Bobr-Polsky]

Thank you for the explanation, I was just surprised that this feature is not in Ancestors legacy. I didn't know that hosting your own game would affect the overall stability of the game. I really appreciate your answer, and thank you for your explanation. I wish everyone on the development team a lot of success.