14 DAY TRIAL // The Xbox 360 version of Titanfall is now officially launched and the development team at Bluepoint Games that worked on it says that the entire creation process associated with the port has been rather difficult because of the inherent hardware limitations of the current-gen console from Microsoft.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Andy O’Neill, the president of the studio, explains that when his team managed to get the entire game experience running on the platform, they were confronted with a 5 frames per second refresh rate even if they were only using one player on the Fracture map.
He states, “Long story short, we've replaced the world renderer, collision system, visibility system, animation system, asset system, asset pipeline, audio system, stuffed in a streaming system and compressed the crap out of the assets to make it fit on a DVD. Yeah, we're not running the vanilla Source renderer.”
The core Titanfall experience was designed for the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PC, both of which have much more powerful hardware than the 360.
O’Neill says that most of the structure of the original Source engine is gone when it comes to graphics and that the shooter is at the moment powered by a Frankengine that uses a lot of small tweaks in order to offer a satisfying experience to gamers.
Bluepoint Games has managed to take the core systems of Titanfall and then create an underlying technology in order to run it on an older device, while making minimal changes to the actual game logic.
The president of the company adds, “When you play Last Titan Standing, which is crazy stress on the CPU, we dial down some of the grunt spawn in rates to reduce network packet processing and entity simulation load on the client. We only do this for LTS, because when you've got 12 giant robots bashing the crap out of each other, you tend not to notice the absence of things to squish underfoot.”
Other changes made to Titanfall are linked to cosmetic elements and optimization.
Titanfall has managed to perform well in term of sales on the Xbox 360, although neither publisher Electronic Arts nor Microsoft has offered a clear platform breakdown until now.
At the moment, developer Respawn Entertainment is working on more updates for the game, which will introduce new game modes, and on a downloadable content pack with more maps that should arrive in May.