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Two Million Players Helped Stress Test Titanfall During Beta
The recent Titanfall beta helped Respawn get a good handle on how the game would hold up once the title's official release date rolls around on March 11. Fortunately, the beta was extremely useful in helping Respawn prepare for that impending launch.
Titanfall is a giant multiplayer game that is reliant on Microsoft's cloud service, Xbox Live Compute. The beta was down for seven hours, but Respawn says that was a "human error," so hopefully the developer was able to work out those kinks during the beta.
"The most important thing for us on launch day is making sure that Microsoft's Xbox Live compute platform can scale up as high as we need it to," said Respawn engineer Jon Shiring. "We had the alpha, but that was fairly small. Alpha proved that the tech works. Beta, the thing we wanted to test was what happens when you scale it really high, see what breaks and then fix that so we don't have to find out on launch day."
Shiring went on to explain just how reliant Respawn is on Microsoft's cloud service. "People are expecting the game to have problems, and I want to make sure that it doesn't. I want to do everything I can to make sure that it launches well. The Xbox Live Compute platform is all brand new. Forza used it a little bit, but they weren't as reliant on it as we are. The game is completely reliant on it. If it's down, nobody can play."
If you missed your opportunity to play the game yourself, read our impressions from the beta here or our analysis of how the game could effect the industry here.
[Source: Polygon]
Our Take
I'm glad so many people were able to jump on the Titanfall beta. Server reliability is sort of a necessary evil for games like this, so hopefully Respawn got the information they needed to ensure that Titanfall will remain up and running with minimal drops in service when it launches.
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