In a recent interview with OXM, Jon Shiring, a programmer from Respawn Studios, the team behind the development of the much anticipated Titalfall, spoke to the game’s cloud based server and the benefits associated with the type of setup they’ve chosen to implement. He was quoted:
“There’s a few different aspects to it, one of which is very practical. Certainly if you’ve played other games, and you’re trying to make a party and not everyone can connect to the same people, so you have to negotiate which one is going to do the party and invite everyone in – all of these things to get around the fact that it’s hard to connect from player to player.
“By having this stuff on the cloud, you can guarantee that everyone will be able to connect. It’s like loading a web page: you don’t have to worry about whether you can load a web page, it just works. So you have this certainty and reliability there. When you’re trying to get together with your friend and just play, there’s no question as to whether you guys are going to be able to get into a match together – it’s just going to work.”
He continued, “We’re using a dual-core server to run all of our matches, so there’s really a significant amount of CPU available to us, and we use that for the AI and the player code and all these kind of things, and we have a lot of bandwidth on these servers.
“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.”
Titanfall releases on March 11th in North America and March 14th in the UK for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC.