Titanfall Is Getting Private Matches

Titanfall Is Getting Private Matches

It’s a general rule that most constantly connnected competitive shooters will evolve and change a whole lot in their lifetimes. Titanfall‘s the newest king of the hill in FPSland and the hit game is no exception. There’s a new patch inbound for the hit game and it’s reconfiguring a lot of stuff. Among other things, it will add a Private Match option. Huzzah!

A post on the official Titanfall site goes in depth as to what’s getting changed and nerfed in the 4/10/2014 Patch Update. The biggest feature is a public test of the Private Match mode, which lets players populate a multiplayer session only with your friends:

Private Match (beta) – This is the first public test of our new Private Match mode. This gives you a way to organise matches with and against your friends, for casual or tournament play. Some features are unfinished or not yet implemented, and we welcome your feedback. A few highlights:

  • Private Match supports 2 to 12 players, with 1 to 6 players on each team.
  • You can start a new Private Match lobby by choosing it on the main selection screen (alongside Campaign, MP, and Training). Invite your friends in or have them join you at any time.
  • Choose any of the game’s maps or modes (CTF, Pilot Hunter, etc.) to play in.
  • Choose which team you’re on.
  • There is no XP gain, challenge progress, or achievement unlocking while in a Private Match. For this beta, the Last Game Summary screen will display what you would have earned in normal play outside of Private Match, but be aware that this progress will not be recorded to your lifetime total.
  • For this beta, there is no concept of a “lobby leader”; any player can change game options in the lobby or start/stop the match countdown.
  • All Private Match games are still played on dedicated servers via Xbox Live Cloud Compute, just like normal matches.
  • New options like round time, score limits, and much more will come in future updates.

The other big changes coming with the patch are tweaks to the functionality of certain weapons. Some of your favourite armaments may work a little differently after the update:

40mm magazine capacity for default and Extended Mag — The default magazine size was making the 40mm too powerful. It is intended to be the only weapon that can take a Titan down without reloading, if used skillfully. However, 20 rounds per magazine were proving to be too high and overly tolerant of indiscriminate fire. We’ve reduced it to 12 rounds per magazine, which still allows players to take a Titan down without reloading, but helps balance it out against other Titan weapons. The extended mag has also been dropped from 25 to 16, with the same design principles applying to this change.

Titan Quad Rocket mag size change — During development, there was a time when the Quad Rocket was too powerful. We made a lot of changes to pull it back before shipping (lessened the screen shake impact, lessened the duration of the first person impact FX, lowered the magazine size, pulled the damage back, etc.) It currently can struggle against other Titan weapons and going back to the 5/6 (default/extended mag) magazine sizes helps balance the weapon and allows players to miss a few shots and still be effective. It was 4/5, now its 5/6.

Titan Quad Rocket damage vs Titan shields — It was taking too long to drop a Titans shields with the Quad Rocket (5 shots). This meant you had to reload before you could even drop an enemy Titan’s shields. This was the only Titan weapon that had this issue. We’ve now upped the damage against Titan shields so that it can drop a shield with 4 shots. Combined with the increased mag size, this damage increase effectively gives you one more volley in the mag to deal serious direct hull damage.

Titan Quad Rocket ‘Rapid Fire’ Mod’s mag size change — We upped the magazine size for the Quad Rocket’s Rapid Fire Mod to help it compete with the changes made to the extended magazine (from 5 to 6). The Rapid Fire Mod’s magazine size is going up from 16 to 18.

And, of course, what would a patch update be without a passel of bug fixes. The repairs hitting the Xbox One and PC are:

BUG FIXES (All Platforms)

  • Fixed an issue where a Titan firing ordnance would not show on the minimap correctly.
  • Fixed a rare bug with Pilot health pools that would make them virtually invincible.
  • Fixed rare cases where Titans could be called in through solid geometry.
  • Titan shields now protect friendly rodeo players from explosion damage (such as from an Arc Cannon).
  • Fixed a case where a Pilot could embark a Titan through walls.
  • Spitfire LMG and XO-16 firing sounds will no longer sometimes cut off before the gun is finished firing.
  • The Archer now locks onto the top of a heavy turret rather than the base of the turret.
  • The Archer’s rockets now home in on Titans correctly when those targets are kneeling.
  • Fixed shadows incorrectly shimmering on a particular area of Lagoon.
  • Fixed Satchel Charges and Particle Walls causing pilots to permanently rodeo other pilots.
  • Fixed certain characters not rendering properly in French and other languages.
  • Fixed an issue where “Initializing…” would be displayed if a server wasn’t found.
  • Fixed being unable to scroll to the top of the datacenter list after scrolling down.
  • Greatly reduced the bandwidth used when connecting to a server. People who previously could not progress past the load-screen when connecting to servers should be able to play now.
  • Grunts now show up on the minimap when they shoot.

Much more information on the April 10 patch is in the full post so head over to the official site and take a look.


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