EA Games’ Patrick Suderland has claimed that the company is confident that its futuristic mech-shooter, Titanfall, won’t self-destruct at launch. The real question is, though, will it suffer a fate similar to what we saw with Battlefield 4?
During the company’s quarterly earnings call, Suderland responded directly to the issues that faced Battlefield 4’s launch by placing emphasis on their quest for pushing innovation across multiple platforms, including two brand new next generation consoles.
He stated that:
“We were pushing innovation heavily and we’re delivering 60 frames per second gameplay for 64 players plus the ability to connect via mobile tablet as a commander into the product, coupled those with some very innovative features in the gameplay side.”
Regardless of EA’s push for innovation, this hardly seems like a viable excuse for delivering a game plagued with bugs and glitches at launch. When a game is shipped and sees a retail release it needs to be playable. It’s just that simple. That being said, there are always going to be a range of issues that simply cannot be addressed until the game finally reaches the hands of the masses, which EA also noted.
“There were different issues that only manifest its scale in the post-launch live environment. We’re taking multiple steps to evaluate what occurred and incorporate those learnings into our development process for future products, so we don’t experience the same problems again,” said Suderland.
It’s great to see that EA is learning from their mistakes, and hopefully that will show through Titanfall‘s March release. Still, it remains a mystery to me as to how EA can have this strong display of confidence before they have even launched the public beta for the game. Remember how confident they were that Battlefield 4 (which had a public beta) would be great at launch?
Meanwhile, the developers behind Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment, are giving their own reasons for gamers to have confidence in the game’s highly anticipated launch. Respawn’s John Shiring took to the studio’s forum stating that, “During our small closed alpha, we rolled out three new server builds and completely moved players from one build to the next without interrupting gameplay. Players never noticed a difference.”
Bravo, Respawn. Bravo.
Utilizing their early beta test as a means of testing new coding for seamlessly integrating updates and fixes is a step in the right direction for delivering a perfect launch, but it’s still a mystery where EA’s confidence is stemming from. Titanfall‘s closed alpha was hosted on the Xbox One, which means this advancement in patching technology is the result of a correspondence between Respawn and Microsoft.
Shiring elaborated on the roots of this partnership when he revealed that:
“Seamless updates are due to the stuff we’ve written. The fact that we can somewhat-easily deploy new builds on Azure is due to the Xbox Live Compute team’s hard work. This is an area that we’ve been working on with them for some time now. We originally told them that no-cert, fast server updates were a requirement for us, and they made that happen.”
Titanfall appears to be in a great position for launching on Microsoft’s consoles, but what will EA do to ensure that Origin is prepared for the future of mech-warfare?
Tell us, will you be picking up Titanfall, and if so, which platform are you planning to purchase it for? I won’t blame you if you plan on waiting in your dropship until the first battle reports come in. While you weigh your options, be sure to bombard our comments section with all of your explosive mech thoughts below.