Third Party Photon Fusion or Unity Gaming Services?

Heyo everyone. I wanted to ask the greater Unity community for your input on what tool would be better for a speculative game I am working on.

For context, I want to create a small-medium sized open-world naval / pirate game where multiple players will be interacting with other players and the game world via naval, ranged, & melee combat, as well as gathering materials in the game world itself. There will be lots of network game object projectiles and fast-paced combat. I want the servers to be dedicated and that the game itself provides and it is not hosted by the players / clients and the server size to be a maximum of 100 players.

I am aware that Unity Gaming Services is more for smaller games but I am wondering if it is now powerful enough to manage a good-sized server amount especially with their latest releases and updates they have been doing.

What would be the best approach for my preferred multiplayer scope? Should I consider using both Photon Fusion and UGS? Can I get away with just using one? I would love to hear any recommendations or comments. Thanks for reading!

 

To extend on the above..

1. You will need a backend. A backend is made from multiple components. In your case the most important ones to get started are authentication, accounts, player data persistence, server hosting. UGS offers all of these. You might also need world persistence depending on how your game works.

2. You will need a real time networking solution. 100 players is a difficult to reach no matter what solution you use and you will run into many scaling problems not just related to netcode. Especially with an open world game which is in itself very hard to build. Both Netcode for Entities and Fusion are up to the task so the decision is whether you'd like to build your game on top of DOTS ECS or the regular Unity MonoBehaviour workflow.