Titanfall wasn't originally planned for Xbox One

According to Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker, "originally we weren't planning on an Xbox One version of the game."

6

Titanfall may be a poster-child for Xbox One, but it wasn't originally planned to hit Microsoft's next-gen console at all. According to Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker, "originally we weren't planning on an Xbox One version of the game." Instead, the team was going to focus entirely on PC. However, making a console version ultimately made the game better across all platforms.

"I'm certain that having an Xbox One version has made our PC version much better," Baker explained to Eurogamer. "It justified the effort in moving to DX11 and even 64-bit."

Titanfall runs on the Source engine, but to get it running on Xbox One, the team had to make significant modifications to ensure it ran in 64-bit and supported DX11. "Part of the conversion gave us the opportunity to re-architect the engine and make it more like we wanted it to be on the memory side," Baker said. "A lot of the work was making the engine multi-threaded. The original Source engine had a main thread that built up a command buffer for the render thread and there was a frame of delay. We kind of changed that so the render thread buffered commands as soon as they were issued."

Although the game has shipped, the team is still focused on making a number of optimizations. Specifically, the Xbox One version is still not at the quality Respawn would like. Currently, the game supports a 792p resolution, but Baker says "the target is either 1080p non-anti-aliased or 900p with FXAA... [but] we don't want to give up anything for higher res. So far we're not 100 per cent happy with any of the options. We're still working on it. For day one it's not going to change. We're still looking at it for post-day one. We're likely to increase resolution after we ship."

Andrew Yoon was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    March 13, 2014 8:30 AM

    Andrew Yoon posted a new article, Titanfall wasn't originally planned for Xbox One.

    According to Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker, "originally we weren't planning on an Xbox One version of the game."

    • reply
      March 13, 2014 8:40 AM

      Get that cheddar baby!

      • reply
        March 13, 2014 3:40 PM

        Well, they did play the, "No, sorry, we can't do X; we're just a small studio" card a few times on their marketing hype train.

        I'm still hoping they take their IP and self-publish their next title, because I still have no interest in Origin. If they really want to make a PC shooter again, they should bring it to Steam, and break free of EA's publisher process, and find a better way to QA their game.

    • reply
      March 13, 2014 9:01 AM

      Halo wasn't planned to be an Xbox title either.

      • reply
        March 13, 2014 9:55 AM

        Or for anything running Microsoft's software for that matter.

        • reply
          March 13, 2014 1:51 PM

          Eh, it was originally going to be a Mac/Windows game, like Myth.

          • reply
            March 13, 2014 2:48 PM

            I remember the incredible amount of PC gamer butt-hurt when it was announced it was going to be X-Box exclusive.

        • reply
          March 13, 2014 2:55 PM

          An apple RTS.....

Hello, Meet Lola