In Titanfall, the war zones are alive with activity. Not just the usual chaos of players scurrying through buildings, blasting each other, but peripheral events, too. Gigantic star cruisers float overhead as smaller craft zip around them firing missiles at distant buildings; towering monsters lope across looming alien backdrops, attacking defensive walls; engineering robots make futile attempts to repair damaged facilities. Developer Respawn Entertainment wanted to instil in its multiplayer-only title a sense of narrative cohesion, a feeling that these distant planets exist beyond the frenzied firefights going on in the foreground.



And about those fights. In a blogpost last summer, programmer Jon Shiring explained in clear terms the benefits of Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ platform – that ethereal marketing construct that has reared its mystical head in every Xbox One publicity drive since last May. Because of the cloud, he said, Titanfall matches won’t have to be hosted by players, which causes all sorts of problems, not least the capacity of the host to cheat or just leave the game, stranding everyone else in the process. Instead, every Titanfall bout will be on a dedicated server, ensuring all players get the same performance, and that the game experience is stable.

It’s a boast that Respawn had to put to the test last month during its Titanfall beta test, which saw the servers opened up to two million players. ”We learned a lot of important lessons,” says Shiring, speaking to the Guardian days after the beta closed. “The whole point of the beta was to make sure that it scales up well. We completely maxed out every data centre in Europe at one point, and we still had more people who wanted to play so we started to invisibly shuffle them over to east coast US data centres so they could take part. We weren’t planning on doing that but we just thought, well, let’s push it until it breaks. That was our mentality.”

The wisdom of clouds



In his blogpost last year, Shiring admitted that the term ‘cloud computing’ has become almost meaningless, a fancy ad man’s idiom for ‘a lot of servers’. But with Titanfall is seems, there has been a clear benefit. The game runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, a vast infrastructure of severs with a global network of data centres. Microsoft’s business model is to rent space on the platform to web companies and even government agencies needing cloud computing resources, so this is in no way unique to Xbox One: any developer on any machine could run a cloud gaming service via Azure. The advantage for developers, though, is that, according to Shiring, Microsoft is offering access to the platform at a massively reduced rate to game makers. Studios that could never afford to harness Azure or rent their own dedicated worldwide server network, can now get on Microsoft’s.



According to Shiring, the benefits aren’t just about being able to offer dedicated servers, it’s about virtualising the online experience and moving a lot of the processing tasks away from the gamer’s machine – known as the client – and toward the server. With a large network of servers available, Respawn is able to seamlessly shift players around when data centres get over-crowded, finding them spaces in other areas. And since the beta, the company has worked out how to track those ‘orphaned’ players – people who have been shifted to a more remote centre – and get them back to their nearest node when things quiten down. ”So, if you’re in Germany you’d rather be on the Amsterdam data server, but we may may move you over to Ireland if the Amsterdam one fills up,” explains Shiring. “And since the beta, we now have the knowledge that whenever you search again, you’d really rather be back in Amsterdam. We can invisibly shuffle you back so you get the lower ping.”

Virtual worlds



Virtualised cloud hosting of this sort has been used for a while in massively-mulitplayer online games, and Mojang employs a similar set-up with its multiplayer hosting service, Minecraft Realms. But using cloud-based or virtualised environments is a really new thing in first-person shooters where latency is much more of an issue. Titanfall is essentially taking the entire multiplayer experience and running it on the server-side - it should mean better in-game performance, smoother matchmaking, and improved social functionality. We’ll need to wait for the launch to see how all this holds up.



For Yusuf Mehdi, the chief marketing and strategy officer for Xbox, this is exciting stuff. It is the evidence Microsoft needs that its approach to the cloud is going to deliver results. “We’re thrilled about what Titanfall is doing to showcase the future of gaming on Xbox One,” he told us. “It takes advantage of the cloud architecture that we’ve built behind Xbox One, which is really new - our Thunderhead servers give you the ability to do a lot of cloud compute, which means very high performance, very fluid games - and in this case a multiplayer world that can operate at incredible performance levels.”



Another key benefit of this set up is that Titanfall is able to do all its AI calculations on the server rather than on your console. This has allowed the designers to fill the landscapes with computer-controlled soldiers who get involved in the action, carrying out their own tasks and helping players. It also means that when you call in a Titan, it can function on its own accord until you get into it, either finding its way to you and following you around or guarding one location – depending on the commands you give it.



Intelligent balance



Getting the computer-controlled troopers to the right level of intelligence has been a major balancing issue accroding to Shiring. “Earlier versions were much tougher,” he says. “They were really formidable, and we’ve dialled it back to the point we think it’s fun. Spectres are harder to fight than the regular guys, but they’re set for fun not for technical prowess - we’re not here to impress everyone with how smart we are at writing AI.



“The grunts and spectres are there to help out. They’ll capture points for you, they’ll hold and defend points - the spectres will leap a couple of storeys up onto the top of buildings if you’re annoying them. There are a lot of different AI behaviours that are all very tuned. It’s really easy to make AI that just laser beams everyone with headshots - the trick is to make them behave so that they don’t look like an aim bot. They have their own thought processes – they scan the world, they look for targets, if you listen to their voice chat you’ll hear that they lose sight and call to each other, they’ll call out when you’re approaching them. When you’re in a titan and you come up on one, if they’re a grunt, they’ll get scared and fall to the ground and you can stomp on them, or they’ll run away - there are a lot of different behaviours happening”





















Player vs system





According to Shiring, access to a low-cost cloud computing network is going to change the way studios design games. ”The two biggest aspects will be that server CPU and the server bandwidth - that’s what allowed us to make Titanfall,“ he says. “When you’re trying to rely on individual PCs or consoles as your server CPU, basically you’re stealing that resource from the player when you could be using the machine’s processing power to make the game look and play better for them - all that fun stuff. By having that reserve CPU out on the server - and it’s significant, it’s like a two-core machine– it’s a different philosophy: it becomes, well, lets use what’s there as efficiently as possible and there’s no benefit to not using it - there’s no downside to clients at all, the game just gets better.



“And the bandwidth is what lets us have so many moving things in the world - we have the AI running around and the spaceships in the sky, all of this is creating network traffic , but as we’re not bandwidth constrained, it’s not this overwhelming technical task anymore. You can say to the designers, go to town dude, try what you like, and it’s just going to work. We’ve really let the designers go crazy on the game. When you get into that mindset… people have ideas of what it’s definitely not okay to talk about while designing multiplayer games and a lot of that goes away. We’re pushing the edge right now, but I have a feeling that other people will arrive at the same conclusions we have.”

Mehdi is clearly onboard with this idea of computing tasks handled in the cloud ether. ”It’s what we’re most excited about,” he says. “That was the reason behind investing so heavily in getting these Thunderhead cloud servers and building our architecture. A lot of games can now offload compute-intensive tasks to the cloud architecture - we can scale that up and down as needs demand. It allows much master game design, it allows smaller studios to build incredible games because they can use our bandwidth as opposed to having to buy and run their own servers, which is costly and time consuming. I think this is really going to open up the whole open-world concept - the idea of multiplayer gaming in a large environment that’s actually living and changing.”

Cloud controversy



There are still issues though, and still concerns. Titanfall’s grunts and titans work in a very specific way in a constrained landscape, so it will be interesting to see how other game types utilise server-side AI. Speaking to Eurogamer last year, EA Dice chief Patrick Bach was skeptical about using the cloud in some real-time gaming calculations, calling the concept “gimmick”. “In practise we’re doing things in real-time,” he told the site, “so you don’t want to send an explosion up to a cloud, calculate it then send the data back down and then it goes poof. We still need to have stuff done in real-time, but I can see other things you could potentially do with it.”

I take this back to Shiring, an ex-member of the Infinity Ward coding team, and ask, really, what are the key differences between working on Titanfall and working on Call of Duty? ”Honestly the biggest thing is the ability to rely on dedicated servers because it frees up so much programming time,” he says. “All the client-side stuff goes away and that’s really gnarly because players can come and go at any time - the sever is the only node in the hub that’s guaranteed to stay there so if you move everything onto the server all the logic becomes really simple, which means we get to spend our time making the game really fun, instead of spending the whole project getting the thing working. It’s not magic, but I got to cut corners - we freed up a lot of programmer time to work on the game rather than the infrastructure.”

But what about the future, what about more sophisticated implementations than a multiplayer first-person shooter taking in confined arenas? We talk about the prospect of massively multiplayer, procedurally generated online worlds; the sorts of things Microsoft hyped during the early days of the Xbox One promotional drive. What about games where the world is online and inhabitable and modifiable by thousands at the same time? ”That’s interesting,” he says. “I mean, we’ve seen it in Minecraft obviously, but I’d like to see it in games like ours. And having the servers out there makes this a lot more reasonable to attempt. You can have the server hold an emergent persistent world, save your state and reload it and keep going from there.

But cloud computing remains controversial. It’s a concept that, however filled with potential, still concerns those who worry about the ownership of games. With Titanfall, a multiplayer-only title, it sort of makes sense that lots of the computing is done on remote servers, but what happens when single-player adventures start offloading tasks to the cloud? What happens when Microsoft or the publisher shuts those servers? Of course, the concept of ’owning’ movies, music and games has become more complex since the dawn of digital distribution, but as more of the control cedes to the corporations and service providers, darker questions are raised.

For now though, many developers like Shiring are excited by the potential of this new technological generation – and it is hard not to be similarly enthused while talking to them. “Everyone is free to make whatever they want now - there aren’t really any massive constraints left,” he says at one point. “We have lots of ram, lots of CPU cores, so it’s a different mentality to a lot of older engines - all the work is much more evenly spread. It’s up to studios to come up with good ideas.

“That’s more exciting to me than any new rendering or shader tech. We can more or less make whatever game we want to make at this point”

• Titanfall is released on PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One on 11 March in the US, and 14 March in Europe. As this is a multiplayer-only title, the Guardian will not run a review until the game has been tested on public servers.



