Two and a half weeks away from Respawn Entertainment’s launch of their brand new IP, Titanfall, what did the studio learn from last week’s Xbox One and PC beta?
Well, for one thing, a lot of people enjoyed it. “We had around two million unique users playing during the beta,” said community manager Abbie Heppe, speaking to Polygon.
When it comes to changes the studio will be making based on the beta’s results, Heppe said the team is “still looking for tweaks to certain weapons or other things. The designers spent a lot of time watching videos and streams of people playing to try and look and see how they were abusing things or not understanding things.”
Fans shouldn’t expect any drastic alterations from the core gameplay that was experienced in the beta, however. “As far as large scale changes, like ‘let’s just get rid of the AI,’ those aren’t things that we’re going to be doing,” added Heppe. “They’re an integral part of what Titanfall is, what makes this game.”
Over on the tech side of things, the engineer in charge of Titanfall’s launch, Jon ‘Slothy’ Shiring, said, “People need to understand that when you write a whole bunch of new code, there’s bugs in it. We have to find those bugs. That was the goal of the beta. We know it’s not going to work right. We don’t want to find out on launch day. Let’s find out now. We found probably 10 real things that we worked on and fixed. That’s 10 things we don’t have to find on launch day. We still might find some new things on launch day, but at least those ones are not there anymore.”
“We went into this knowing, here are potential things that might be broken,” Shiring added. “A lot of it is to look and see what people are doing and complaining about, to see which of those hunches were right.
“We’re not completely ignorant of what might be a problem in the game, but we don’t want to nerf everything just in case. A lot of it is, the way we’re doing certain things, is that going to be a problem when it’s a lot of people, or is it only a problem when it’s a few people playing? So a lot of it is us checking our own data.”
With more insight on the inner workings of the recently passed beta and the game’s upcoming launch, where do your hopes for Titanfall lie?
Titanfall launches on the Xbox One and PC March 11, and on the Xbox 360 March 25.