Remember all the Cloud functionality that Respawn Entertainment hyped up for Titanfall? With the game having been released, there’ve been criticism that the Xbox Live Compute function is actually non-existent. Engineer Jon Shiring refuted those claims in a podcast session with Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb.

“There’s a lot of things we’re doing in [Titanfall] that’s really different from how any other game has done it before. In sort of the traditional model of dedicated servers is you go to your server and that is your home base and you love it.

“One of the key things that is interesting about the Xbox Live Compute that runs on Azure is that they’ve commodotised servers so much, that we just don’t care. I can ask for a server, use it for 10 seconds, and then go like, ‘ah we don’t need it anymore’ and throw it out.

“We bounce people around server to server, and so you’re hitting a lot of different servers and that let’s us do cool things. But it completely upends the old model of like, ‘I’m going to find my server and stay there forever’.

“And so there’s been a lot of interesting changes because of that idea that’s gone through everything from matchmaking and skill and how we do the training in the beginning of the game and all these things that are – no one’s really tried before and kind of left everyone scratching their heads for a while when we were figuring out how we were going to do it. But it was really interesting to me.

“And I know that the internet is very sceptical that this is real. Hopefully less so now that Titanfall is out and they realize that they really are playing on these servers out there.”

Shiring repeated the points that Respawn revealed about just what the Cloud functionality is capable of. It allows Titanfall to “go crazy and do things like throw AI in multiplayer and have these ships flying around the world and all these things that in a peer-to-peer hosted game – I know this is a little technical, but in a peer-to-peer hosted game, the bandwidth isn’t there.

“You’re not going to find all these home consoles that have the amount of CPU and bandwidth you need to be broadcasting that there’s 400 things moving this frame. It just melts down everything that is there. So once we can just tell the designers, ‘yeah don’t worry about it, just spawn that thing and make it move. It’s fine.’”

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Though Respawn Entertainment continues to court both admiration and dissent over the decision to cap Titanfall’s multiplayer at 12 players, it revealed that there would be as many as 50 characters on a map at a given time. This included AIs, players and Titans, with one Titan per player.

In an interview with OXM, programmer Jon Shiring explained that such implementation was possible using Cloud technology.

“All these things are what actually let us have all the AI and all the players and huge Titans running around with all these physics. The extra bandwidth is what lets us fill the world with moving things, and the available CPU is what lets us do things like AI, you know? And it’s not just a bullet flying through the air, that’s moving and causing network data, it’s an actual AI that’s making decisions and trying to shoot at things and looking around.”

According to Shiring, there was some input from Respawn’s side to Microsoft. “That’s something I went to Microsoft on pretty early into Respawn and said: ‘We want to make a game, and we’re going to need dedicated servers, how can you guys help us out?’”

“And we had an interesting dialogue there, and that’s really when we came back with all this Xbox Live Compute idea – so we’ve been working on it with them for a long time, and all of the versions of our game will be using it. But on all platforms it’s letting us make a game that obviously nobody’s been able to make in the past, so it’s really exciting, the capability that we now have.”

Titanfall’s integration of the Cloud also extends to the Xbox 360 and PC though, so don’t worry about this being a next gen exclusive feature. The game is scheduled to release on March 11th in North America and March 14th in the UK.

However, when speaking to Videogamer, DICE executive producer Patrick Bach – who is working on Battlefield 4 – stated that the game wouldn’t support Live Compute from day one. “Not from day one. The reasons for that are multiple.

“We started this project before these plans were locked down, so we didn’t dare fiddle too much with it. Also, we’re not Xbox One exclusive, so we needed a solution that would work on all platforms. We’re on five platforms, so we need something that’s Battlefield, not Xbox One.”

Does that mean we’ll see it later? We’ll find out after Battlefield 4 launches on October 29th for North America and November 1st for Europe on current-gen consoles. It will be arriving for Xbox One on November 22nd.