Titanfall engineer Jon Shiring explained on Respawn.com how his team's game -- as well as other Xbox One and PC titles -- will take advantage of Microsoft's Azure cloud service.

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When Respawn couldn't afford the cash or manpower to acquire the "hundreds of thousands of servers" necessary to put players in dedicated servers, "The Xbox group came back to us with a way for us to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers" in the form of the cloud. Shiring says that also "lets us push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets us have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that!"

You can get even more CPU on your dedicated servers to do new things like dozens of AI and giant autopilot titans!

Suddenly you have no more host advantage!

Bandwidth for the servers is guaranteed from the hosting provider!

You can use all of the available CPU and memory on the player machines for awesome visuals and audio!

Hacked-host cheating isn’t an issue!

Matchmaking can be lightning fast since it’s guaranteed that everyone can connect to your servers.

And since the servers aren’t going to go disconnect to watch Netflix, you don’t need to migrate hosts anymore!

So what are the advantages of dedicated servers vs. player-hosted environments? Shiring explains:The cloud can "scale up and down automatically as players come and go. We can upload new programs for them to run and they handle the deployment for us. And they’ll host our game servers for other platforms, too!" This applies to all three versions of Titanfall -- Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC.Shiring also refers to Forza Motorsport 5's " Drivatar " system, which stores player behavior in the cloud to create an A.I. racer to compete against other Xbox Live players."This is a really big deal, and it can make online games better," Shiring says. "This is something that we are really excited about. The Xbox Live Cloud lets us to do things in Titanfall that no player-hosted multiplayer game can do. That has allowed us to push the boundaries in online multiplayer and that’s awesome. We want to try new ideas and let the player do things they’ve never been able to do before!"Respawn expects the cloud to be something that "lets us drive all sorts of new ideas in online games for years to come."

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN