AI-controlled minions, set piece moments, and other such things are possible

Mar 17, 2014 17:11 GMT  ·  By

Titanfall's cloud-based feature using Microsoft's Azure system has allowed developer Respawn Entertainment to "go crazy" and add all sorts of cool elements to the online first-person shooter, according to one of its programmers.

Titanfall finally launched last week and developer Respawn Entertainment proudly bragged about the many new ways the game is using the cloud system offered by Microsoft with its Azure infrastructure in order to add new elements.

The power of the cloud, according to Respawn's Jon Shiring, allowed a great amount of freedom when it came to designing the first-person shooter. He talked with Larry Hryb in a podcast, via MP1st.

According to him, the cloud gave developers a chance to "go crazy and do things like throw AI in multiplayer and have these ships flying around the world and all these things that in a peer-to-peer hosted game – I know this is a little technical, but in a peer-to-peer hosted game, the bandwidth isn’t there."

Shiring emphasized that doing something like Titanfall using just the power of local consoles or PC would be downright impossible.

"You’re not going to find all these home consoles that have the amount of CPU and bandwidth you need to be broadcasting that there’s 400 things moving this frame. It just melts down everything that is there. So once we can just tell the designers, 'yeah don’t worry about it, just spawn that thing and make it move. It’s fine'."

Titanfall makes use of the cloud functions to allow the presence of AI-controlled fighters, like grunts or spectres, not to mention different things that happen in the background.

Thanks to the new power, Respawn's designers were finally able to just implement all the cool things they wanted in the game, according to Shiring.

"[They] weren’t constantly fighting limitations, they were just trying to, 'hey you know what’d be cool? It’d be cool if this happened.' You know if you had a gun that shot all these things and each one was a real particle and it’s going to travel through the air, you’re doing a lot less compromising and you’re just letting them go do great stuff, cause our designers are really, really good, and the worst thing we can do is tell them 'no'."

Titanfall is certainly a well-designed game and looks really impressive on the PC and Xbox One. It's going to be interesting to see how it will handle on the underpowered Xbox 360, as it will debut for it next week.