Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

Treyarch announced recently that the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 will support the use of dedicated servers. Cesar Stastny, Treyarch’s Directory of Technology, posted the following Tweet over the weekend on his @pcdev account: “Confirmed: Ranked Dedicated Servers for ‪#BlackOps2.”

This is great news, for PC gamers at least, as it will help to cut down on Call of Duty’s notoriously bad lag compensation. Anyone who has ever played any CoD game online has most likely suffered numerous deaths as the result of lag. Whenever you light someone up, get killed, and then the kill cam shows you not firing at all – that’s the lag compensation at work.

The use of dedicated servers in the Call of Duty franchise for PC has been spotty with some games using them and others not. Modern Warfare 3 supported dedicated servers but only in unranked matches (games where you don’t earn XP or level up) which makes absolutely no sense at all considering it would be the ranked games that need to lag the least. Luckily Treyarch is allowing dedicated servers to work on ranked games in CoD Black Ops 2.

Unfortunately, the console versions of the game will still work on a host-based system. One has to wonder why the PC version of Call of Duty games, which sell only a fraction of copies compared to the console versions, are the ones that gets dedicated server support. According to numbers from VGChartz, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold about 1.39 million copies worldwide on PC. Compare that to the 14.14 million copies worldwide for Xbox 360 or the 11.97 million copies for PS3. Fans have been clamoring for dedicated servers on consoles for years so why don’t these versions get some love?

Black Ops 2 is set to break sales records when it releases worldwide on November 13, 2012. It will be available for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. It is also rumored there may be Nintendo Wii and Wii U versions in the works.