Respawn Entertainment confirms what the Cloud will bring to Titanfall

Exactly what Microsoft’s fabled Cloud tech will bring to Xbox One’s Titanfall is a question that has now been answered, and the answer is this: a new way of providing dedicated servers.

That’s right, it’s as simple as that. No Cloud rendering, calculating or ‘Driveatar’ type things for Titanfall, just plain old dedicated servers, and that’s bloody good news.

Heppe’s blog post essentially explains the evils of peer to peer networking, the type of online networking that console multiplayer normally uses for games like Call of Duty or Halo, and bigs up dedicated servers, which are the things us members of the PC master race are used to.

The difference between the two is simple, for peer to peer (P2P) networking the game chooses the player with the largest available bandwidth to host the match and from that point all information about what’s going on in the match goes to and from that player’s console. The problem with this is fairly obvious: that one player will have a large advantage over the rest as they are essentially playing with zero lag whilst other players are not.

With a dedicated server everyone connects to a separate machine that sends and receives information to each player equally, with distance from the server being the only possible cause for connection lag, other than simply having slow internet of course.

In laments terms: peer to peer networking is not an equal playing ground, while dedicated servers are.

Titanfall will be using Microsoft’s Cloud service (Azure) as a cheap way of providing dedicated servers. As you can imagine it costs a fair amount of money to rent or buy hundreds of servers to conduct multiplayer games all over the world.

Heppe’s explanation of the process is far more in-depth, so you should check out her blog post right here.