The answer to that question, as far as we can tell, seems to be no.
In a thread posted over at the official Respawn website, one user posted an email chain with Abbie Heppe, the Community Manager at Respawn, who stated that it was “really a question for Microsoft” before writing, in a later email, that the servers used during testing of Titanfall were not Australian. Most likely they were based in Singapore.
So will Titanfall have local Australian servers? The answer is most likely no.
But Abbie Heppe is correct — this really is a question for Microsoft. It’s generally believed that any local servers used for Xbox One games in Australia will be run from its Azure Centres, which are dotted around the globe. Microsoft has already announced plans to build two local Azure Centres in Australia but hasn’t announced much beyond that. These centres will be located somewhere in Victoria and NSW, but we don’t know precisely when they will be established. Microsoft has stated its Azure Centres will launch later this year, but it’s extremely doubtful they’ll be up and running for the launch of Titanfall.
In addition, these centres are primarily aimed at business users who want to set up their own cloud based infrastructures without setting up their own data centres, but the expectation is they’ll also be used to more front facing services like local servers for games like Titanfall — but even that hasn’t been confirmed at this stage.
Comments
41 responses to “Will Titanfall Have Local Australian Servers At Launch?”
On the upside the PC version should have them, power to the people.
They are off loading the AI combatants to “The Cloud” apparently, so I don’t like our chances
i sometimes forget that in this peasant filled gaming world that most of the articles are written for consoles
so glad for dedicated servers
glory to gaben
true
Too bad that the publisher is EA, and Microsoft are running Azure servers. We won’t see Australian servers on ANY platform until late 2014.
Hmmm – I’d be interested to hear from Aussies how the game plays currently and if lag is an issue at all. If it is then Titanfall will not be a day 1 purchase for me.
@nemalive How was the connection when you played? Was there any noticeable lag?
About 200 ping connecting to the US west coast servers.
I was off sick during the alpha 😉 when I played during the day I experienced no lag at all, but when I hit my peak times and after the titans have come into play I did notice lag……if I kept away from the main action it was still playable.
I read the alpha wasn’t playing at full specs yet so this could get worse.
Good news is you can select your region, I’m in WA so Singaporean servers here I come lol.
just for the record I suffered worse lag with Cod and BF4, but titanfall is only 6 v 6 human the rest is Ai hence the lag not being as bad for me?
Well if what they said about the AI is correct, then the server is hosting the AI. So even the AI should contribute to lag.
Actually I would think so too, but cod squads which also uses AI when we verse AI there’s never any lag but vs other human squads there’s lag.
I know there’s heaps of factors that can contribute to this but just my observation
To put it simply, there will be lag. There will be lag in every game ever online…cuz straya internet. Unless you’re one of the lucky ones that gets good internet.
So many factors to say no to here…
But ‘straya internet’ qualifies his statement alone.
Oh well.
Even with a gigabit fibre NBN connection, you will still have noticeable lag connecting to US servers. You’re only going to be able to fix that by physically moving closer to the US.
Speed of light can only move at… well. Speed of light, natch.
This is bullshit. With local servers, the ping is much less of an issue.
about 150ms ping to E/SE Asian servers
for the most part its ok. but a lot of suss/lag deaths happening due to ping. causing apparent one shot kills.
if we don’t get dedicated australian servers, the game wont make it on to my buy list.
Ah, I hadn’t even thought of this. If this is a server side game and not peer to peer, I wont be buying it then. I was really keen to buy this day one, but I’m not playing on yank servers.
and yet desperate nerds will still buy it, thereby not teaching the publisher and MSFT a lesson
Battlefield 4 even on Xbone has Australian servers, this is a massive draw card for me and make me feel like they actually care about their fans
But is that running on MS’s servers or EA’s? BF4 has Australian servers on PS3, too, but EA are running them, not Sony.
Yes it does, but it’s not like EA is tapping into the MS servers; most, if not all of their games use EA branded servers, so I would be surprised if this was any different.
just another reason we need a FTTP NBN rather than a patchwork of networks. Businesses won’t invest in Australia until there’s the infrastructure here
FTTP would be the best, but FTTN would still be a marked improvement.
Bloody morning brain, I meant FTTP. FTTN is an expensive stopgap to nowhere.
I shall edit my comment thus rendering your reply (relatively) meaningless mwahahahahaha
I’m not much for coherent speech anyhow. I’ll happily let it stay there… looking wrong.
Did not cross my mind that they might not have aussie servers at launch. Was already on the fence about getting this day 1, this might make it a certain no….. Will have to wait and see what the lag is like during the beta I guess.
Well Abbie Heppe confirmed at the EB Games Expo that we would not be getting local dedicated servers for Australia. She stated that they would be hosted through the Microsoft Azure network from Singapore.
My biggest gripe with this is the amount of hops between Australia & Singapore & how much latency will we encounter as we play the game. If the game is a lagfest it will be abandon quickly by Australian gamer.
If Microsoft was smart they would look at renting servers from local providers until the Azure network was established in Australia. Would be a smart idea but one I doubt Microsoft implement due to the size of the community here in Australia.
With only 6v6 players lag may not be an issue? Then again, Australian Internet.
The other question is how many other players in the region will feed into the Singapore data centre? China, Japan, Indonesia? if we get all the from the different regions dropping into our games imagine how much lag\latency we are going to encounter.
I watch in horror when oversea’s people drop into Battlefield and the game becomes a lagfest. The 6v6 number was the one promising point I was hoping may help us, then again maybe it won’t.
Oh dear, this worries me a LOT. Halo 3 and Reach had good connection searching which made play P2P games a dream (if you were willing to put up with longer search times) but Halo 4 took out that feature. The result? The Australian Halo community dropped it like hot potato, seriously, within a month or two Aussies largely abandoned it.
Not just Australians, pretty much everyone outside US dropped.
I even read one comment from someone who dropped the game despite his internet being 1,000mps.
Not to sound like a fanboy but I’m actually reading this as a pretty positive thing. It sucks that Titanfall won’t launch with dedicated Australian servers but for once it’s more than a case of Australian players being overlooked/dismissed as too small a market share to invest in. This sums up to ‘XBOX One games, not just Titanfall, will have the option of using the Azure Centers. When they do they will have dedicated Australian servers regardless of developer intent. However the hardware isn’t in place yet so we won’t see it happening on Day One for Titanfall’.
Sucks today and they really dropped the ball, but a year from now this is excellent news.
This is a good point.
This is bullshit, they should do what every other decent shooter does and host servers, or at least release the server binary so people can run / host their own. Then they can do it like Battlefield, where you apply for official status.
But that’s sort of my point. The best shooters in the world routinely overlook the need for regional multiplayer. Last generation the overall quality of the game had almost no impact on whether it had local only match-making, Australian servers or ‘Oceanic’ designated servers on MMOs (even if they’re not located within the country they’re damn important for getting people playing at the right times). We saw some fantastically crafted shooters that were totally unplayable.
It’s crap that Titanfall won’t have day one local servers, and I stand by my stance that it’s unethical to release a multiplayer centric action game without some form of local match-making, I just see the way they’re talking here as a positive thing overall. Microsoft are finally acknowledging this at the proper platform wide level, and as much as people hate them Microsoft are leaders in the field so others will follow.
If you’re talking about console shooters, which I wouldn’t classify as ‘best in the world’, I would see your point. But PC shooters have had dedicated servers for a long time. Yes, I appreciate that MS is finally doing that for console games, but they are still taking a pretty walled garden approach.
EDIT: Doesn’t BF4 on consoles have dedicated servers? Because they run off similar binaries to the PC version?
Battlefield in particular has been good about this stuff on consoles (although not always). There are some console games that do it well and they’ll be free to continue to do it well.
Gears of War may not have been your cup of tea, but it was undeniably one of the best shooters of the last generation. Ranked match making in it was a joke because of latency issues. It ruined an otherwise brilliant shooter. There are plenty of other great games from last generation that, if you prefer console based shooters to PC, were ruined by flawed match-making.
To say there’s no great shooters on consoles is like a gay man saying there are no attractive women. It’s personal preference.
You may not like the walled garden approach, I don’t either, but it’s a reality we’ve got to face and at least Microsoft have shown they’re looking to ensure that people outside of North America can enter their walled garden. Again, individual developers are free to continue to do it however they want so this move doesn’t stop Battlefield from doing it right, but Microsoft’s Azure Center hosting should ultimately raise the bar from it’s currently shameful level.
I mean Titanfall is a primarily console game that plans to justify the big investment by making money selling DLC, and as such the odds of it having a full suite of hosting tools like PC shooters tend to were pretty low regardless of Cloud based AI or Microsoft’s Azure hosting.
I’m not saying Titanfall’s lack of Australian servers is a good thing, even if it was only a week long wait for Australian servers I’d be pissed, but there is certainly a silver lining on this bad news. Previously it would have been a case of them flat out ignoring the issue but today Microsoft actually talked about it and their solution, while not ideal, will mean better online gaming for Australian players.
Oh well, it was fun while is lasted.
…
…seriously! How long will it take before developers/publishers finally get it through their thick skulls! No local servers or local search option kills all multiplayer games! I still believe it’s the first reason why everybody dropped Halo 4 within 3 months!
Despite the population I still manage to play lag free in games with those options. I still remember playing Transformers: War for Cybertron that only had 300 people playing the game. But with their local only search option it was always Australians.
Hell, I managed to play with Australians in the game Blur when there was only 30 people left. BLUR! A game that killed its own company! Even they managed to include the option.
Hey man, give it some time, according to 343 PR, Halo 4 takes time to observe your connection to start putting you in good matches. So each laggy game was brining you closer to lag free bliss. So it’s actually your fault for quitting. You’re to blame
Really? I thought the reason why I always quit is because of my shitty teammates bringing down my K/D ratio and stealing my sniper rifle. It can’t possibly be because the other team was outplaying me.
Yes! To all yr thoughts
How can people defend this? We’ve had local ‘australian’ servers in shooters for a long time. I hope the baby doesn’t get thrown out with the bathwater so to speak, and they leave PC high and dry when they could easily allow server hosting (ALA every decent shooter of the last 10 years).
Disappointed, and until confirmation on PC servers locally, will not be purchasing or supporting.
Why do you need to worry about official servers? Do like PC has always done with TF2 and Counter-Strike etc, and have people set up their own dedicated servers. No brainer.
Oh god. Unless they’re actually going down the monumentally bone-headed move of not letting people run their own servers… Why would you even… gah!
What the?
What about this then http://games.on.net/2013/06/titanfall-confirms-dedicated-servers-local-australian-support-read-our-e3-impressions/
They double backed?
Well they just took out the Aussie server for titan fall i dont see any Aussie server anymore anyone have a clue when its fkn Friday 1;30 if so why couldn’t they just say Saturday