Titanfall 2 will not have a multiplayer beta on PC

Respawn Entertainment has announced that Titanfall 2 will not have a multiplayer test on PC, citing security concerns and hardware compatibility issues.

The developer says that they haven’t fully optimized the game’s engine on PC, which is a harder task than it is on consoles. They also said that a multiplayer test on PC could leak information about the game’s singleplayer campaign.

Here at Gaming on PC we don’t quite understand Respawn‘s thought process, as a multiplayer beta could prove invaluably helpful on PC, since it would let the development team find incompatibilities and bugs that they may otherwise not discover until the game is fully released.

 

In their words:

 

The multiplayer tech test is around the corner, and nothing really helps us more than when millions of people play together, stress our systems and try out things we never would have thought of and try out new things in ways we wouldn’t otherwise imagine.

The main reason we are doing a MP tech test is to satisfy an engineering goal – to stress test our servers and prove that they can scale.  Since our server backend is per-platform, it means we only actually need a single platform to test this.  More platforms can be a good sanity check, but we don’t need to test them all to make sure we are on a good path for launch.

With this challenge in mind we’ve decided to make the multiplayer tech test available on Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

So why not PC?

Two big issues from a development standpoint: hardware variety & “min spec” optimization. We’re still making a lot of tweaks and changes to the renderer, the game, and effects so we haven’t run the game through the hardware compatibility lab yet to detect and handle a large variety of hardware – video cards, CPUs etc. Quite frankly, we aren’t ready to deal with that yet, we are still making the game better. We also haven’t done enough work to fully support our ‘Min Spec’ on PC yet. So, currently the PC game isn’t as easy to throw out for testing as the console is, because of the additional variables and configurations that we need to support. Also, because the single player story has some wonderful secrets that we really want to preserve for launch, we also have to worry about leaks.  Our wonderfully curious PC players have proven in the past that they will dig out anything they can, and there’s a risk that they could spoil some of our single player.

We realize this is a big disappointment for our PC fans, but we feel this allows us to concentrate on the real purpose of the tech test and focus on the server stability and scalability. Rest assured we’re confident in our ability to deliver a great PC experience for launch. We appreciate your understanding, and we look forward to seeing everyone on The Frontier this October.

Vince Zampella
Founder and CEO
Respawn Entertainment

One thought on “Titanfall 2 will not have a multiplayer beta on PC

  1. Pingback: Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will not have a beta test on PC | Gaming on PC

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