Titanfall is a new (hopefully) blockbuster game for the Xbox One.  It’s coming out from publisher Electronic Arts and is due to be released in March 2014.

The beta tests attracted more than 2 million players. The full game is planned for a March 11 release for the Xbox One and PC; although Xbox 360 owners will have to wait until March 25 to get their hands on the shooter.

The emphasis of Titanfall is pure gameplay rather than technical sophistication. As an exclusive game for Microsoft consoles it also uses Windows Azure cloud technology and an iteration of the Source engine dating from the time of Portal 2.

Windows Azure is enabling Titanfall

Abbie Heppe, the Community Manager of Respawn, said that the cloud computing service from Microsoft is responsible for the arrival of Titanfall and possible means to experience posits.

“We are one of the first games to take advantage of Xbox Live Cloud and have engaged in throughout the world to provide a consistent and incredible experience for players servers. Of course we also make some of our calculations of artificial intelligence through the cloud, and all this just promoting our game,” Heppe said.

The Windows Azure potential is taken for the implementation for certain calculations. Thanks to remote access offered by Windows Azure, it allows a whole new level of gaming experience and provide a common hardware platform. As a platform, Azure looks very good for potential support for massively multiplayer gaming as well, which can only benefit games such as Titanfall.

“We had a tremendous opportunity and the right to create something new from the beginning of the new generation now, and we have the option of using Windows Azure,” he added.

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 the gaming company to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers in the form of the cloud. Windows Azure has push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets the developer have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that!

“This is a really big deal, and it can make online games better,” says Titanfall engineer Jon Shiring. “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!”

How Azure is helping building the game

Titanfall faced some problems when they moved away from the dedicated server model due to operational costs and replaced it with a player-host model. Games are having to choose between different player hosts, and must make hard decisions about which one should be the host, with two different measurements: bandwidth and latency. It also means slower updates and increased lag due to server not being dedicated and local player receives faster updates than other players.

When developers of Titanfall approached both Sony and Microsoft, the Xbox group came back to them with a way to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers. This development allowed the developers push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, with more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that.

Titanfall’s AI hosting, physics calculations, online match making and multi-player dedicated servers are hosted in Windows Azure. Azure PaaS is being utilized to provide physics calculations and specialized AI to learn your style of play, whereas the PaaS and dedicated servers auto scale to provide fast dynamic content to players around the world on a consistent scale.

“Microsoft thought about our problem in a bigger way. Developers aren’t going to just want dedicated servers – they’ll have all kinds of features that need a server to do some kind of work to make games better,” Shiring said. “So they built this powerful system to let us create all sorts of tasks that they will run for us, and it 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! Titanfall uses the Xbox Live Cloud to run dedicated servers for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox 360.”

Azure PaaS is being used to handle several expensive calculations normally performed by the local host–allowing developers to optimize the Xbox One hardware to handle more graphically intense environments. The server cost and total hours of man power is also being reduced for Respawn Entertainment due to the automatic server scaling and incredibly cheap virtual machine costs. In addition, it has given the opportunity for developers to increase the install base substantially.