Talking to D+PAD at a recent GoW2 preview event, lead designer Cliff Bleszinski has delivered the bad news that online host advantage will still be present in Gears of War 2, despite saying otherwise earlier in the year.

When asked about host advantage, Cliff told us:

“It’s been reduced. The person who is the host on a client server game will always have an advantage. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the client server architecture. We’re not a peer-to-peer architecture, but we’ve authorised so much into that code to reduce it as much as possible as well as balancing the game better with the shotgun’s stopping power. Personally I found the host advantage to be very frustrating.”

Host advantage plagued the original Gears’ online multiplayer, giving hosts an unfair advantage over other players. Fortunately our recent hands-on with the game seemed to suggest that the shotgun’s stopping power had been reduced, so hopefully hosts won’t be shotgun spamming us too much when the game launches on November 7th.

You can check out the full interview with Cliff here, and look out for our hands-on report with Gears of War 2 in the next issue of D+PAD, coming to www.dpadmagazine.com on October 14th.

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