The original Titanfall surprised Australian and New Zealand gamers alike when local servers were announced scant days after the game’s release. For console gamers used to ridiculous pings, Sydney-based Azure servers were a godsend across Windows PC and Xbox One.
With the franchise now expanding to PS4, Stevivor sat down with Respawn’s Jon ‘Slothy’ Shiring to discuss how servers would work this time around.
We already knew that Respawn is teaming up with GAME Digital to use its Multiplay service, but what that meant for Australia and New Zealand wasn’t exactly clear… even with a handy informational video from Shiring himself.
“[GAME Digital is] building more of a system than a server hosting thing,” Shiring explained. “They’re building a system that will work with all the clouds plus bare metal, so we can allocate a server and they can figure out how to best do it.”
The clouds Shiring refer to include Microsoft’s Azure system alongside those from Amazon and Google. Bare metal refers to servers in data centres all around the world that Respawn will rent out for months at a time.
“Basically, there’s going to be some level of bare metal – and we’ll use those first, ‘cause we’ve already paid for them – and every day when we go above that, we’ll start bursting into the cloud. Some of that is doing this so it’s most cost effective, but it’s also another way to make sure we have huge scalability. We have not just one cloud, but many clouds. If one goes down, if one runs out of capacity, we just go into the next one. We feel really strongly; the game should just work. Users shouldn’t have to care about all this technical stuff, and I don’t want to have to explain to anyone why it doesn’t work.”
The MultiPlay system is basically redundancies on top of redundancies.
“I want game launches to not be this thing that makes everyone scared every time,” Shiring continued. “We’re just making our way towards that with every game we do.”
When speaking of Australia and New Zealand specifically, Shiring’s eyes lit up. Clearly, our region is a networking geek’s dream.
“We will have data centres in Australia,” he said, excitedly. “In the tech test, you’ll see some.”
He wasn’t lying. In the (pre-)pre-alpha test that Stevivor played through in early August, two Sydney servers were already online and able to be selected.
“There probably will be more data centres for the launch than the tech test – some of that is tactical, some of that is timing,” he explained. “We care very much about our Australian fans. That was a big push for us last game; we actually paid for that data centre in Australia before Azure was ready for us. We cared so much about you guys and we wanted you to have a great experience.”
Again, he’s not lying. Back in January of 2014, Respawn advised that a local Azure server farm just wouldn’t be up and running in time for the game. Then, just a day after launch, Respawn’s Vince Zampella took to Twitter with the surprise (great) news, confirming a joint effort by Microsoft, EA and the developer had made it happen.
Aussie servers coming online, starting Friday morning and building capacity each day! Combined EA/MS/Respawn effort to make it happen!
— Vince Zampella (@VinceZampella) March 13, 2014
While MultiPlay’s very nature means Australia and New Zealand could see servers popping up in other locations, Shiring advised that other constraints may limit those new additions.
“Places like Perth and New Zealand give me nightmares,” he said with a laugh. “Not because of technical reasons, but because of population and the times of day people play. How big populations get in each playlist. Even if we had data centres in all of these different locations, we wouldn’t have enough people for a lot of the day to even fill a match. So you have to pool people into bigger areas just to get good matchmaking in fun games.”
Those challenges are why we use Sydney-based servers more than anything else.
“Unfortunately, Australia is very big but without a population density that’s the same as other places. I wish there were more people there — it would make my life so much easier,” he said with a laugh.
That said, just because there are only Sydney-based servers now doesn’t mean that will always be the case.
“This is something we’ll be watching very closely,” he said. “If we see people with pings that we’re not happy with, and if there are ways we can improve that by spinning up servers somewhere else, the bare metal capacity means we can just call an ISP somewhere and say, ‘give us a bunch of boxes’. The system that MultiPlay has built will just start using it for the people that it would be better for, depending on population.”
Stevivor travelled to Los Angeles, CA to preview Titanfall 2 as a guest of Electronic Arts.
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