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Hi everyone. So today we're taking a look at the problems and failures
of Titanfall on the Xbox One. Because
unfortunately this is a game that's been released with a lot of problems
and the root cause really is the Xbox One.
I mean, there's no two ways about it. Many of the issues that I commented on during
beta, and I said I didn't think were going to be able to be fixed before launch
I was correct. They haven't fixed them before launch and so
what we end up with with a game like Titanfall is a series of compromises
purely because of the Xbox One. For instance
6v6 players. No one could really understand why we were only going to get
6v6 players
until you play Titanfall on Xbox One and you realise that if they'd gone 8v8 or
more
simply the console wouldn't have been able to cope. It's as simple as that. The fill rate
required for stompy stompy robots exploding with guns going off
unfortunately brings the Xbox One to its knees.
Frame rate drops are prevalent throughout Titanfall on Xbox One
to a point where I started to wonder whether the gamewas actually going to be playable
at all really. We saw frame rates as low as five frames a second at
regular intervals and also, you know, during actual
gameplay where you've got a lot of robots, Titans
on screen at one time, the frame rate was dipping quite easily under 15 frames
a second
for long stretches of time, three to five seconds at a time.
Anyone who plays Twitch-based first-person shooters or anything like that
you know, frame rate is absolutely crucial
and when we take that hand-in-hand with resolution
people the other day were screaming at me saying resolution isn't important,frame
rate is all-important. Frame rate's the most important thing in a shooter
well all right, where do you stand now guys? Because the frame rate in Titanfall on Xbox One is trash
frankly. It is almost unplayable in places.
It completely overshadows the competency of the game's developers here
who've done a phenomenal job at producing Titanfall and
creating a really world class shooter but being completely dragged down
by frankly, the poor system performance of the Xbox One.
Now what we heard from Respawn, just a
couple of days after the launch of Titanfall in the States was that
the additional power they were expecting to get from the Kinect, this additional
8% Microsoft were going to give them from turning off features on the Kinect
has not been realised yet and so effectively Microsoft have allowed this
game to go out
knowing that it wasn't going to hit any kind of, you know, quality bar.
Because they haven't turned over this extra power to the developers
effectively Titanfall is running around 8% slower
than it should be. Yet Microsoft allowed this game to be released.
So let's talk really about Titanfall as a series of compromises because
originally the guys at Respawn were not going to release this on
an Xbox console, they were only building this game for PCs
and then a little while ago, let's say around a year ago,
EA did a deal with Microsoft to bring it exclusively to Microsoft's
ecosystem so Xbox 360, Xbox One
and PC. Now, what I personally think is at that point that's when the series of
compromises really kicked in for Titanfall.
Before they were probably quite happily producing a PC game they were going to put it out there,
see how the market worked and then maybe do an Xbox or PlayStation release towards
the end of 2014, once they knew the market
was going to support a game like this. And of course the gameplay is fantastic on PC.
If you're running this game with a stable frame rate locked at 60 frames a second
with moderate hardware in my opinion. Not low end hardware but just moderate hardware.
When I'm running this game on a, you know, a PC with a
nearly four-year-old core i7 processor in it and 16 gig of ram.
You don't need the latest and greatest equipment,you just need
reasonable spec. And this game absolutely flies along
being on the Source engine and all, it should be
but for my mind the whole thing that Microsoft have managed to do here
is score yet another own goal and give everyone another reason
to say the Xbox One is underpowered. Because
if you allow your games developer to release a game on a deadline
for your console yet you haven't got them the power of the Kinect sorted out yet
so they're not utilising the full power of the Kinect,
if they're still having problems getting the ESRAM and the resolution
kind of working well together,so the amount of data you're putting into the ESRAM
versus obviously what you want on the screen at the resolution you want to do it
then effectively you're just saying you don't care what people think of your
console Microsoft. Enough people are now looking at Titanfall
on Xbox One and they're scratching their heads as to why this thing was released
in this state frankly. The frame rate issue is a major one
and whilst I accept that Respawn are going to release a patch which might
improve the resolution to 960p or whatever they're going to be targeting
ultimately it will still be a way short of 1080p and
if they're struggling for resolution to do 792p
and achieve a stable frame rate, then wow, what hope have we actually
got for Titanfall on the Xbox One right now?Strictly speaking if they released that
extra 8% power it
shouldn't go into increasing the resolution it should go into making the frame rate
stable
because right now a higher resolution we're probably still going to have these
really nasty frame rate dips. Overall Tintanfall as a
game is flawed on the Xbox One, it probably shouldn't have been released
at least not at this juncture in the game's development.
I personally feel Respawn needed another six months.
Another six months for Microsoft to get their act together.
To get this power across to developers to potentially improve DirectX 11.2
potentially DirectX 12 although I don't think we'll see that until
2015 myself.
And so really empower the developers to make
the game look and feel as good as possible on Xbox One.
It just seems that Microsoft are now kind of rolling away on a delivery schedule
and actually they're not really taking an eye to quality and
how these things are going to land for the consumers and in many respects that is
exactly the problem Microsoft had
over the whole of 2013 as well. The attention to detail
the care for the consumer who is going to ultimately be buying this product
and then talking about it to their friends, Microsoft
do not have an eye on that right now and I think personally,
it's hurting them in the long run. This is not to say that Titanfall is not a phenomenal game
it is. The gameplay is fantastic. This is Call of Duty Mark 2
effectively with big stompy robots. But when we look at the problems and failures
of Titanfall and where it's having the biggest issues
it's sat right there on the Xbox One. It's not a great game
on Xbox One because of these massive frame rate dips.
Now I know some people say 'what frame rate dips, I haven't encountered any?'
Well all I can say is with 20-odd years of experience there are frame rate dips
and they are gnarly. And these are also being echoed by many
other journalists as well, who were that at the private EA review session
bear in mind, three days before the game's launch they got three hours to spend
with the game to play through the campaign and many of them mention
the same thing. The frame rate is simply not stable.
So if all of that information was known beforehand
obviously it was from play test we were seeing it in the beta,
ultimately this game was released too early. It was released
in order to meet a deadline not to meet a quality bar with a
console it was targeting and for my mind that is going to do the
world of damage long time to Titanfall's brand. People
won't accept a game which has really glitchy frame rates
when it's supposed to be a fast and frenetic frenetic shooter.
you have to have those stable frame rates and the Xbox One just isn't
delivering right now.
The question is this: how long will it take Respawn to get that 8% power
boost from Kinect in place
and also improve those frame rates as well and hopefully maybe some resolution as
well.
Ultimately now time is going to run out fot Titanfall because
over the next couple weeks and months there's not really a lot of content there
within the game
as it stands right now so we're going to be looking at DLC and again I want you to pay
for it
but the question is will consumers actually be willing to fork out more
money
for a sub-standard game on Xbox One?