Despite For Honor being touted as a competitive game, Ubisoft for some reason decided to launch it with absolutely no dedicated servers. While this didn't end up being as big of a problem as I anticipated, it was still incredibly annoying to get randomly booted out of a game, get hit from behind by an enemy that just popped into existence, and other such lovely examples of connection problems.

As such, I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that Ubisoft has announced that they are working on dedicated servers, among other major improvements such as better defensive combat, a new tutorial and training arena, as well as a whole bunch of new characters. There is a ridiculous amount of stuff to cover, so if you're interested in all of the details you will find what you seek on the official blog post, but for now allow me to share a few choice quotes about the dedicated servers:

"One of them, and the main reason for us, is that we want to improve the stability of the matches on 4v4, and we want to have an architecture that is more long-term, that could help us more in the future for the things we want to do next. And then you have some very simple examples; with dedicated servers, you don’t have session host migration anymore, so there is no game pausing when somebody leaves the session.

You won’t have to manage your NATs. You don’t have to check your NAT if you want to play with a friend or things like that. So it will also help greatly the overall experience of the player, from matchmaking to the game session itself, to playing with friends, and things like that.

It’s a big job. I won’t lie to you, it’s a very big change. We often use a metaphor, internally, that we’re changing the engine of a car while it runs. So it’s a lot of work, but it’s work that has already started quite some time ago. But it will take time, and it will go through several steps before we can release it progressively to the players."

All of this will take quite a while, but worry not as the developers will be working on improving the current infrastructure until it can finally be replaced. Some of these changes arrived with the most recent patch, and there will be more coming in the near future, but all of this will be minor improvements to tide everyone over until proper dedicated servers come online. I can only hope that with all of these changes and improvements Ubisoft will be able to bring back For Honor from the brink like they've already done with the now excellent Rainbow Six: Siege.