EARTH DEFENSE FORCE 6 - About sign in with an Epic Games account. - Steam News
For this game, to enhance cross play and online functionality, Online play requires signing in to your Epic Games account. We apologize for the lack of advance notice. Signing in to your Epic Games account is required the first time you play online. Usuall...
I don't really blame them for using Epic Online Services. If it's something you didn't know about, Epic essentially offers a ton of free multiplayer services to game developers--matchmaking, etc. I'd say for a smaller game it's probably better to use than some sort of independent server, because it may be a lot more resilient to being shut down in a year. All of it is totally cross platform, cross-engine and can be authenticated without an Epic account. I've played around with it a bit, but the miserable little game I'm working on isn't ready for a multiplayer implementation quite yet.
I know because I'm typing words on the internet I'm supposed to have a seething fire of hate for Epic because the Steam community told me to, but they actually offer a lot of really good stuff to small game devs for nothing.
The fact that an account is required is the devs fault. They should use the Connect Interface (which lets users ID by all sorts of platform tokens) versus the Auth Interface (requires Epic account). There's tech stuff about it here https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/game-services/eos-connect-interface#differences-between-auth-interface-and-connect-interface
Sure, but they already had a great implementation in EDF 5 so this isnt their first online rodeo. I get that they wanted crossplay but they defintely should have made it optional at least, instead of forcing on everyone who doesnt want crossplay or to even play the game offline.
Any multiplayer game should offer LAN-based P2P and/or self-hosted server options as far as I'm concerned, just because that's totally future proof. That should just be a default feature for a multiplayer game.
Beyond that you have to pick something, because normies aren't going to run their own servers and using open P2P via the internet is all kinds of security holes.
I do wonder what they were using before, Steamworks I assume? There's nothing wrong with that, but it only works on Steam.
I think its just p2p which should still be the case in edf 6 unless you are using crossplay.