: I'd suspect even custom games will run on the dedicated servers, because
: otherwise the issue of Halo 1's netcode becomes an issue again. You
: shouldn't need to worry about the latency with this though; the idea of
: having the game run on a dedicated server is that each person is roughly
: equal distance from the host rather than one person being host and being
: at 0ms ping and everyone else being roughly equ-distant from them. Level
: playing field, so to speak.

That can balance things out more sometimes (but not completely, some people will still be farther from host server than other people), but the main thing is that dedis can have good upstream bandwidth, so you can use complex asynchronous networking schemes to permit handling lots of stuff client-side.

Peer-to-peer games with lots of stuff happening in-game often use synchronous networking schemes which only pass player input data between users; each player's machine carries out the full simulation of gameplay on their own, but it only works if everything that directly affects gameplay is synchronized, which means that you can't even apply your own action to the game until you send it to the host, the host gives it a timestamp saying when it can be applied, and you receive it back and apply it. What that means is, the higher your ping is, the more input lag you have. The Halo games on 360 used a clever trick where a player's viewing direction doesn't have a direct impact on gameplay, so usage of the right analog stick is still handled instantaneously client-side, but everything else has lag.

Halo MCC is likely to at least use a model like HPC's; if they were just going to fully synchronize it, the tech is already there in the original game (the LAN networking model), and the gains of using dedis really aren't that huge.