14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Respawn Entertainment has recently introduced a set of comprehensive anti-cheating measures for its recently launched Titanfall and the company says that it is confident that no legitimate fans will be affected by them in the long term.
Jon Shiring, the leading network engineer at the company, and Abbie Heppe, a community manager, are telling Gamasutra that, “Left unchecked, cheaters will make any competitive game not fun for players who don't cheat. In a multiplayer game like ours they will ruin the match for others and the memory of it will stick with them for a while. A small number of cheaters will have a much larger impact on the community. So it's really important to us that we quickly find and flag the cheaters.”
The system that the company is employing is called FairFight and has previously been used with good results in the Battlefield 4 first-person shooter from developer DICE and publisher Electronic Arts.
Respawn is using it to make sure that those who are caught using any sort of cheats are moved to a player pool where they will have to compete with their fellow unfair gamers, making sure that the experience remains fun for the rest of the population.
The company is also making sure that in the rare instances when gamers claim that they have been unfairly targeted in Titanfall by FairFight, the company offers a review process.
The studio representatives add, “In some cases they are really rare bugs, and we don't punish the players for that -- we've spent considerable time investigating those to see how they could happen. In many cases, we can fix it with a server patch so the bug just goes away.”
Titanfall is at the moment offered on the PC, where the majority of cheating offences are being registered, and on the Xbox One home consoler from Microsoft.
It will also soon be delivered on the Xbox 360, after a delay, and the company says that it has no long-term plans to offer cross-platform play.
The new first-person shooter will get a number of new game modes via free updates and Respawn and Electronic Arts are also planning to deliver at least three major downloadable content packs filled with maps and other items.
Recently, the studio has implemented a matchmaking update for Titanfall that’s designed to introduce more variety to the teams that are generated for every battle.