There’s no question that TitanFall has been a wild success for Xbox and PC gamers and, for the most part, gamers have feasted on it since its launch a week and a half ago. But now that we’re away from the honeymoon period and have extensive time to assess the game as-is, we have some points to make that Respawn Entertainment and Microsoft need to address in an update sooner than later.
Party Chat: For whatever reason, after TitanFall launched the Xbox One’s party chat function seems to be a bit touchy again, leaving some without the ability to voice chat with any of their fellow party members. We’ve even seen issues where players will get connectivity errors that force a rejoin just to continue chatting. There have been players that you could hear/could talk that all of the sudden aren’t able to anymore. It’s a mixed bag of good/bad experiences for players and it needs to be addressed immediately. After all, how much fun are you going to have if you’re playing with friends but having zero communication with them?
Latency: Another enigma here is the dedicated server connectivity. TitanFall runs on Microsoft-hosted computers via Xbox Live, which is backed by Microsoft’s cloud system known as Azure. For the most part, matches run start-to-end without dropping players (at least 99.9% of the time from what we can tell). One thing that is worrisome is that, despite the dedicated servers, players are still lagging and latency has climbed recently from 30-35ms averages up to 50-60ms averages (based on our own experiences as of late). There’s no telling how much worse it gets for other players, however the proof is in the pudding when you add killcams and the “Xbox, record that” functions, where we’ve noticed that more than a little discrepancy between what happens server-side and what we’re seeing in game. Players getting shot up after evading fire by ducking into a corner still take damage and die. Titans are ripping pilots out of their chassis when in “doomed state” but seem to be well beyond arms reach – the problem being that in order to grab a pilot you have to be very close (melee range). All of this is likely attributed to latency issues and getting the dedicated servers to run more consistently with lower average latency will do wonders for the game experience.
Consistent Graphics: The game is supposed to receive a patch at some point to optimize the graphical performance and up the resolution of the game on the Xbox One. This update is still not confirmed for a release date, but the problem of graphical consistency also are a point of concern as there will be minor/major framerate drops that can greatly affect a heated battle for better or worse, depending on how you fare through it. Screen tearing also occurs at times and can be a bit distracting, leaving horizontal lines on screen while motion occurs – not as important but still annoying. Even if Respawn don’t ever push the game to 1080p this is an essential fix area that needs to be addressed soon while players are still fully enveloped in the online shooter.
Resets: A select group of players have hit up TitanFall’s Twitter and forum feeds to report issues with their ranks, along with everything else along with it, reset to first-generation level 1. That’s a bit of a fiery subject since some players are trying to climb the ladder to the final-generation 10. This definitely requires fixing asap.
There are various other quirks and hiccups with things like the lobby and party matching system, but they tend to be on the less-frequent side and not everyone may experience them. One way or the other, TitanFall could really use a quick patch. Respawn have done a couple small tweaks this week already but they haven’t addressed all of the noticeable issues on their end yet. As for the server operations, Respawn have said in interviews that it’s not their problem to fix the servers. That’s not them dishing off responsibility, but actually identifying that Microsoft is the hosting partner and for optimizations to come then it will all be with Azure and Xbox Live. That’s a nice luxury to have as a development studio and has all of the sudden become a hot point for other devs and publication studios. Microsoft’s cloud approach hasn’t yet been fully adopted by anyone except for maybe Respawn Entertainment. Now that studios are seeing such a high-magnitude online shooter work better than most games of the new generation out of the gate there seems to be an increase in interest in the Xbox One’s cloud service, something select Respawn employees noted when being asked about the delivery of TitanFall with Microsoft’s online platform.
There is plenty of good news on the horizon for TitanFall with an un-dated DLC package on the way sometime in the next two months according to various online reports. Additional large-scale fixes and additions are likely coming with the DLC rollout and gamers can expect new game modes to come along with all of the fixes and maps. If you’re looking at TitanFall with reasonable expectations, it is nice to see it functioning so well out of the gate given that Respawn consider it “unfinished”.
Xbox One Game Source 