Jon Shiring, lead engineer at Respawn Entertainment, reveals how the developer is planning to prevent server connection issues for Titanfall 2 on launch day.
Online games are judged quickly based on how well the servers hold up during launch week. For many shooters, the large rush of players on day one is a hard thing to plan for – typically resulting in downtime. Respawn Entertainment appears to be going the extra mile to eliminate any fears over server issues or other connectivity problems that could arise on day one for its upcoming shooterTitanfall 2. With a much bigger launch planned, the developer is tapping into not just one cloud based platform this time around, but three.
Jon Shiring, the lead engineer at Respawn Entertainment, revealed that the company is not just partnering with Microsoft and its cloud service for Titanfall 2, but that it is also using the cloud servers from Google, Amazon, and “bare metal” servers running in data centers all over the world as well. Like Titanfall, these dedicated servers will handle AI, physics, and player movement as well as connecting players quickly and with low-latency.
In addition to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, Respawn has partnered with a UK-based company called Multiplay, who specialize in game server hosting. The two companies have been working together on a brand new service that is able to spin up servers on a variety of hosting services that can scale at the highest rates and quality levels. The ultimate goal here is to keep the game running, even if an entire cloud service goes offline.
While it sounds great on paper, this service is brand new and has not been tested in a real life scenario. Respawn is well aware of this hitch which is why the company is planning to run a multiplayer technical test closer to launch, hopefully to find and eliminate any issues prior to the worldwide release.
Considering it was a PC and Xbox exclusive, Titanfall utilized Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, something which hadn’t really been done prior. While the added cloud storage and computing allowed Respawn to utilized extra processing power and server space, it wasn’t enough to prevent issues for users on day one. While the server issues on PC and Xbox Live connection issues were fixed in relatively short order, it was still disappointing for many gamers who picked up a copy and weren’t able to immediately jump into the online only game.
Launch day issues have unfortunately become quite normal for games that feature online components. The most notorious example of launch day issues is probably Battlefield 4, which suffered from problem so significant that the game continued to have issues months after launch. The situation became so bad that EA was even hit with three different lawsuits over the state of the game.
What do you think of the plan that Respawn has put together for the online portion of its game? Do you think this will work or are you expecting some sort of issue when the rush of players hit the servers? Sound off in the comments below.
[Source: Game Rant]
