Respawn’s upcoming first person mecha shooter title Titanfall is one of the hottest multiplayer titles set to arrive early next year, and while we are awaiting any real official detail about the game, the first set of details have arrived discussing the game’s successful Xbox Live cloud integration.
Jon Shiring, an engineer from Respawn Entertainment, recently posted a detailed article that discusses about the cloud integration in the game and the amount of technical details behind it. The game’s biggest feature is said to be the use of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Could servers that let developers create new technical shortcuts without any real pain ease (compared to the previous generation of consoles).
“I personally talked to both Microsoft and Sony and explained that we need to find a way to have potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dedicated servers at a price point that you can’t get right now. Microsoft realized that player-hosted servers are actually holding back online gaming and that this is something that they could help solve, and ran full-speed with this idea,” Shiring wrote.
“The Xbox group came back to us with a way for us to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers and that lets us push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets us have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that!”
He went on to explain that with the help of the Xbox Live Cloud, the company need not worry “about estimating how many servers we’ll need on launch day. We don’t have to find ISPs all over the globe and rent servers from each one. We don’t have to maintain the servers or copy new builds to every server. That lets us focus on things that make our game more fun.”
Another advantage that Respawn has here is the fact that Microsoft has its datacenters all over the world, and so everyone playing the game should expect a consistent, low latency connection for their local datacenter.
Speaking about Microsoft’s own policy in this matter, Shiring explained: “Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it’s far more affordable than other hosting options – their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers. So because of this, dedicated servers are much more of a realistic option for developers who don’t want to make compromises on their player experience, and it opens up a lot more things that we can do in an online game.”
While these are only words from the devs at the moment, the legitimacy of this will be seen as soon as the game goes live for fans next year.
Titanfall is currently set to arrive on Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.
