The Titanfall hype train is running at full speed today and for good reason. “It’s hard to understate how incredibly important Titanfall is for Xbox,” said Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing and strategy officer for devices and studios at Microsoft. I’ve put together a special titanic sized Snatch with all the news for the game, be it good, bad or “what the hell?”
The game has found its way in the hands of some players earlier than expected and that may have given them an unfair advantage. MP1st reports that some gamers have already ranked up to 2nd generation in the game, the equivalent of a Prestige in Call of Duty.
However, those who have got a copy early face a ban on TwitchTV if they stream before launch. Anyone who broadcasts Titanfall before 12:01am EST tonight without “express written permission” from Respawn faces a “DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] suspension”.
The multi-player campaign in the game allegedly rather short and lasts a couple of hours.
It’s about looking where people spend most of their time,” explained Respawn.“Generally people will burn through a single-player campaign as fast as they can … For us, it was about pushing the boundaries of what multiplayer is. Let’s take all that great single-player stuff and build up the world. That world that you’re going to spend a hundred hours in should be the most full-featured.”
For classic arcade games such as Asteroids and Centipede, now with added Titan, click here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyggnm_xumU
The intro to the game has leaked out and is rather odd and reminds me a little of the Star Trek Enterprise title sequence.
“Titanfall will help propel the idea of high-definition gaming,” – Patrick Soderlund, the executive vice president of EA Studios at Electronic Arts.
You may recall earlier reports of the Titanfall beta playing at 792p with Respawn saying they were aiming for 900p on release. A user on Reddit has compared screens from the beta with the release code and found that the final resolution for the game is still 792p.
Based on some careful pixel counting (measuring the amount of aliasing artifacts on flat edges), I’ve concluded that the Xbox One version of Titanfall is not rendering at an enhanced resolution relative to the beta. The One version of Titanfall still renders at 792p.
Another site, Beyond3D, has also suggested the game is still running at 792p.
UPDATE: Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker has confirmed that the game does indeed run at 792p but the resolution may increase after launch with a patch.
“We’re going to experiment. The target is either 1080p non-anti-aliased or 900p with FXAA. We’re trying to optimise… we don’t want to give up anything for higher res,” said Richard “So far we’re not 100 per cent happy with any of the options, we’re still working on it. For day one it’s not going to change. We’re still looking at it for post-day one. We’re likely to increase resolution after we ship.”
“A lot of the performance is on the GPU side. There’s still room for optimisation and we’re still working on it,” Baker added. “Ideally it would have been a rock-solid 60 all the time when we shipped but obviously when there’s big fights going on, lots of particle effects, lots of physics objects… we’re still working to condense the systems, make them more parallel so we can hit 60 all the time, ideally.”
Vince Zampella has also confirmed the PC version does not run at 60FPS unless V-Sync in enabled, which can result in screen-tearing and lag.
@AjayLikesGaming no, but working on it
— Vince Zampella (@VinceZampella) March 8, 2014
Sticking with Vince, that ‘Future of Titanfall’ announcement that Microsoft were crowing about?
Talked with @geoffkeighley and it looks like the 'future' thing is just something fun. Not how I would have described it, but still fun.
— Vince Zampella (@VinceZampella) March 8, 2014
It is probably related to this – http://yourtitanisready.com. Respawn have teamed up with visual effects studio Playfight “to bring you original content set within the vast expanse of the Titanfall universe.”
“Titanfall is set in a rich near future universe with visceral, epic battles with Pilots and their Titan companions,” explained Dusty Welch from Respawn. “We wanted to partner with Playfight, who has a history of delivering movies that meld gameplay, live action and stellar CG into truly entertaining media, for Titanfall. What this collaboration brings is yet to unfold…”
Good news for our Antipodean chums, it looks like they will be getting dedicated local servers, Vince Zampella tweeting “We’ll have good news soon for aussies”.
Bizarre Titanfall News of the Day: If you go to the Gamestop website in the United States, and browse products and then sort them by bestselling, Titanfall is being outsold by.. the PlayStation 4 camera.
Official Xbox Magazine has published the times you will be able to download the digital version of the game.
- United States: 3/11/14 – 12:00 AM PDT
- Canada: 3/11/14 – 12:00 AM PDT
- Mexico: 3/11/14 – 12:00 AM PST
- Brazil: 3/11/14 – 4:00 AM BRT
- Austria: 3/13/14 – 12:00 AM CET
- France: 3/13/14 – 12:00 AM CET
- Germany: 3/13/14 – 12:00 AM CET
- Ireland: 3/14/14 – 12:00 AM GMT
- Italy: 3/13/14 – 12:00 AM CET
- Spain: 3/13/14 – 12:00 AM CET
- United Kingdom: 3/14/14 – 12:00 AM GMT
- Australia: 3/13/14 – 12:00 AM AEDT
- New Zealand: 3/14/14 – 12:00 AM NZDT
34 gig of your 50gb PC install of Titanfall is uncompressed audio and includes English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Traditional Chinese audio packs.
And Finally…
Source: NYTimes / Mp1st / Reddit / Beyond3d / OXM / Gamespot / Videogamer / Escapist / Ausgamer / Escapist
bunimomike
Boogie… no!!! My eyes. MY EYES!
Lyts1985
Careful TC, you’ll be accused of being too pro-MS with articles like this… ;-)
gazzagb
Sadly, it all seems a bit rushed. Lower than expected resolutions, poor PC optimisation, and not compressing the audio just seems lazy. I really hope the launch goes well, I still haven’t got my GPU back so going to have to wait until I can pick it up myself, although it looks as if there will be no harm in waiting.
Stefan L
Lower resolutions on XBO, yes, but the PC thing isn’t too big a deal, when anything moderately decent will be able to hit 60Hz and double buffer without much problem.
Uncompressed audio is preferable to compressed, anyway. What’s silly is that it’s bundling in every single language under the sun, but the audio fidelity which was possible via the PS3’s Blu-ray disc size was actually quite a nice advantage last gen.
gazzagb
Yes, uncompressed is better, but if I was downloading the game, I’d much rather save some bandwidth and space over high fidelity gunshots! ;)
And as long as the PC version runs sweet as a nut (with or without V-Sync), they’ll be no complaints from me when I get the game!
gazzagb
Also, is TSA reviewing the game? Just read a couple on some other sites.
leeroye
“34 gig of your 50gb PC install of Titanfall is uncompressed audio and includes English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Traditional Chinese audio packs.”
Why? What a total waste of HDD space. This game does seem rushed. Sounds like they are still working on a lot of things like resolution etc.
Kennykazey
Why can’t language packs be optional, if it’s true those 34GB are audio then I’m pretty pissed about that.
And on the topic of resolution, 900p with FXAA or 1080p without? FXAA hardly has any hit on performance, whereas that resolution-bumb should be very noticeable being 50 percent more pixels to render. Surely they must mean MSAA?
Voolar
Apparently TF on the XB1 suffers from a lot of tearing and has frame rate drops to single figures when a lot of Titans are on screen all at once. It isn’t that pretty either. All of this seems to have slipped passed most of the fluff pieces, er… reviews I’ve read. The Engadget article about the cloud was clearly written by MS.
Why didn’t they just go 720p and work on getting everything else right? What’s with this strange resolution…?
Well, I’m sure the game is fun – which is the main thing. Next gen…? I’m not convinced. I guess it’s early in the cycle and I’m sure it’ll shift some XB1s which is what MS was (literally) banking on (particularly as the 360 version is “delayed”).
I’m happy to wait for Wolfenstein…
Severn2j
My guess is that they are specifically avoiding 720p because of the media fallout that would no-doubt result.