Measuring the Xbox One Against PCs With Titanfall

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week, Respawn Entertainment launched Titanfall, a futuristic first-person shooter with mechs that has been held up as the poster child for the Xbox One. The Digital Foundry blog took the opportunity to compare how the game plays on the Xbox One to its performance on a well-appointed PC. Naturally, the PC version outperforms, but the compromises are bigger than you'd expect for a newly-released console. For example, it runs at an odd resolution (1408x792), the frame rate 'clearly isn't anywhere near locked' to 60fps, and there's some unavoidable screen tear. Reviews for the game are generally positive — RPS says most of the individual systems in Titanfall are fun, but the forced multiplayer interaction is offputting. Giant Bomb puts it more succinctly: 'Titanfall is a very specific game built for a specific type of person.' Side note: the game has a 48GB install footprint on PCs, owing largely to 35GB of uncompressed audio."

Comments

Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

Filthy console peasants never seem to learn.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just about frame rate either. A keyboard-mouse player will always be able to defeat a joystick player easily.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Paradise Pete]

A keyboard-mouse player will always be able to defeat a joystick player easily.

Not if they're both sitting on the couch.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[epyT-R]

Why would a keyboard player sit on a couch?

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[jones_supa]

To make it impossible for him to play in full capacity so the joystick player gets an advantage.

Hahaa...

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I've found trackballs work far better than a mouse for FPS...and less space needed too!

Re:Glorious PC Master Race

[Anonymous Coward]

This was modded "insightful"? Not funny or flamebait? Haha oh wow.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[smash]

Because that's where his friends are, drinking beer.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[drinkypoo]

The speed and accuracy of a trackman wheel are phenomenal. I'm at least as good with it in FPSes etc as I am with a mouse. As a bonus, I trade lots of wrist pain for a little thumb pain, which I consider to be a win. Sadly, they are made with crap omron microswitches which will fail you and it's easy for crud to get into the scrolling wheel and clog it up.

I am a gigantic mutant with big meat hands, so finding a mouse which I like is a big challenge in any case. Perhaps this is not the solution for everyone. But the resolution of these devices is very good, and really more than suitable for gaming. Just clean the hand salsa out of the rollers periodically and you'll be all right.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[VanGarrett]

You know, what I find funny about this, is that the only console games I ever see commercials for these days are FPS, with the occasional Third Person affair.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[Wraithlyn]

Why do you say that? I play with KB+M from my couch perfectly fine, on a PC hooked up to a projector and 5.1 sound.

Takes a USB hub on my coffee table, and one of these things on a pillow beside me for a proper (ie, elbow supporting) mouse surface.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[drsquare]

If you're moving your mouse with your wrist you're doing it wrong.

Re: Glorious PC Master Race

[PopeRatzo]

I recently played a few hours of Mario Kart 64 (yep, dusted of the old N64) on a couch with some friends and by the end of it, my lower back was killing me. I never get this when I spend 4 hours playing Civ IV.

Absolutely. If you look at the posture of someone playing a console game, you will see an arched back, pressure on the lumbar, neck pulled back, often feet not flat on the floor.

As you can see from this photo of me playing WoW, PC gaming provides a much more healthy posture:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xAf6...

35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was so that lower spec PCs can run it.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Shinobi]

It was claimed that uncompressing the audio would tie up an entire core. The large amount is also because they stupidly install all languages at once, even if you select a specific language at installation time.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

That doesn't make any sense. Why not offer an install option to decompress the audio if that is the case?

I could see them wanting lossless audio, but FLAC isn't very computationally expensive, and fuck we have so many cores these days you could just dedicate one of them to this and only this and you wouldn't lose anything. It is also quite literally impossible to improve audio quality beyond 48/16 FLAC if you have normal human ears, and it costs all of nothing to implement.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone more aware of the rationale behind this tell me that this is not as retarded as it sounds?

"Respawn Entertainment, the game's developer, claims the uncompressed audio was included for the benefit of slower PCs. "A two-core machine would dedicate a huge chunk of one core to just decompressing audio," says Richard Baker, Respawn's Lead Engineer. "We couldn't dedicate those resources to audio." The Xbox One decodes audio in hardware, so it has no such limitation."

Good thing disk I/O doesn't take any processing power!

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[DrXym]

So what they claw back from the CPU overhead of decoding MP3, they lose by hogging the IO and increased memory use (and paging). Sounds a pretty weak rationalisation really. Besides, if it really were an issue for dual core machines, then they could decode and cache the audio on those machines rather than inflicting this stupid overhead on every machine.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is as retarded as it sounds. There is absolutely no justification for it in this is this day and age. Using look ahead decompression and caching would be a net equal, or perhaps a smidgeon higher CPU usage. It means they are in effect wasting DMA bandwidth and CPU cache by streaming uncompressed files.

I'm a DSP guy by trade, and it's one thing that's obvious - game programmers don't know how to do sound properly.

They continue to insist on driving audio by the "main" game engine thread (see Valve's games with looping audio and stutters when things get busy). Or even when they dedicate a thread, they continue to use a push model for sound - when almost all modern audio APIs have agreed that a callback based model is the "correct" way. (The notable exception being OSS which is broken for this reason).

The pro-audio guys have pretty much nailed how you do low latency high priority audio, and the game programmers continue to get it wrong.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Arker]

Yeah, it's as retarded as it sounds.

Official explanation is that older machines were using too much CPU decoding the audio. In this case the fix could be worse than the problem, because now you run the risk of saturating disk and memory IO. Frying pan, fire, hah.

Might have been wise to shop around for codec/decoder combinations that worked properly instead.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[marcello_dl]

>>(35GB of uncompressed audio)
> It was so that lower spec PCs can run it.
OMG have you thought your answer through? that would be effective only for a PC which is powerful enough to manage the graphics and engine and does not spare the cycles for audio.

Given that a 166mhz pc from twenty years ago effortlessly decoded mp3s in realtime, that in the meantime people have improved decoders, encoders, formats that audio playing is parallelizable, that uncompressed audio requires uncompressed IO, I think "aliens wanted that" is a better explanation. The best of course being that a 45gb game is less piratable than a 10gb one.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[vipw]

That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Opportunist]

My guess would be that they could not use the same compression codec used on XBox due to licensing issues, found that out only briefly before release date and didn't have time to redo it for the PC version and all they could get done in time was to pump the uncompressed audio files out.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Narishma]

It's not Microsoft.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Gadget_Guy]

That's the claim, but the probable truth is that it's intentional bloat to reduce piracy.

Considering that both the pirated and legitimate versions of the game has to be downloaded, how would forcing it to be a large download prevent piracy? It would make things harder to distribute the pirated version on optical media, but who does that these days?

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[obarthelemy]

Spoken like someone who thinks his situation is everyone's. I know a lot of players with very under-specced rigs. And no SSD.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not Microsoft you imbecile. It's developed by Respawn which an independent studio and published by EA through their partners program. They have a deal with MS to make it exclusive for exactly one title. A Titanfall 2 would most likely be on both platforms (PS4 and XB1) and would not necessarily even be published by EA.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Nemyst]

Huh? Developer: Respawn. Publisher: EA. Only thing Microsoft does is handle the servers, because EA uses Azure. But don't let that get in the way of some nice Microsoft trolling, eh?

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[fa2k]

The gains from not compressing are probably negated by the disk I/O latency caused by not being able to cache the gigabytes of audio content or the memory usage due to keeping it in RAM.

[I'm all for lossles audio, but they could at least have done FLAC and saved half the space]

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[ultranova]

When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.

You can't stream 128 uncompressed audio streams from the HDD simultaneously, which means they have to be preloaded, which means you could just as well store them in compressed form on HDD and uncompress during loading.

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Dutch Gun]

It is as retarded as it sounds. There is absolutely no justification for it in this is this day and age. Using look ahead decompression and caching would be a net equal, or perhaps a smidgeon higher CPU usage. It means they are in effect wasting DMA bandwidth and CPU cache by streaming uncompressed files.

I'm a DSP guy by trade, and it's one thing that's obvious - game programmers don't know how to do sound properly.

They continue to insist on driving audio by the "main" game engine thread (see Valve's games with looping audio and stutters when things get busy). Or even when they dedicate a thread, they continue to use a push model for sound - when almost all modern audio APIs have agreed that a callback based model is the "correct" way. (The notable exception being OSS which is broken for this reason).

The pro-audio guys have pretty much nailed how you do low latency high priority audio, and the game programmers continue to get it wrong.

As a professional game audio programmer, let me say that you're painting with a pretty large brush when you say that "game programmers don't know how to do sound." No offense intended, but you really shouldn't try to sound like an expert on game audio about unless you've worked on a AAA game engine. There are demands that games place on hardware systems that you really wouldn't understand. It's not like a DAW system where you can devote nearly 100% of the system resources to processing the audio. Yes, of course there are similarities, but the constraints and requirements are very different.

First of all, unless they're absolutely retarded, no audio programmer would push any sort of audio processing on the main thread. Sorry, but it just wouldn't, and isn't, happening. I don't even have to look at the source code to know that, because I know these guys aren't utter morons or incompetents.

Secondly, if you're a DSP guy, you're largely working at a level that game audio programmers do NOT typically work at - that is, the DSP and mixing level. Most game engines use professional third-party mixing/decoding engines with excellent, highly tuned code developed by specialists over many years of work, and are every bit as optimized as pro audio engines. Having used FMOD in our own game, I know it can decode and mix real-time compressed data in dozens of streams simultaneously, applying lowpass, highpass, reverb, echo, etc to them, and still only take up a small percentage of a single core. I believe Valve licenses the Miles Sound System, but I don't know for certain that this is the engine used in question.

That being said, I agree that leaving audio uncompressed seems unnecessary, at least for technical reasons. Having said that, I don't like to question the programmers judgment because I'm not there working on the project, and don't have all the fact. I have some recent experience with this, having recently shipped a game with a new, custom game engine I wrote that sits on top of the low-level FMOD mixing engine. We decided to keep all our samples compressed in memory, and were pretty impressed with the overall performance.

MP3 was used for most samples, as it has the most efficient decoder, and Vorbis was used when required for either seamless looping or multichannel audio. Additionally, each voice also had lowpass and highpass filtering performed on it. Dynamically calculated reverb settings and a custom echo filter I wrote was applied to the mix as well, plus the overhead of basic mixing operations, of which I used the highest quality 5-point spline-based mixing variation. We found that, on average, audio processing tended to take between 10 and 40 percent of a single core on a typical mid-grade PC (of about two years ago), depending on the level of activity going on at the time, with the vast majority of the CPU time used for audio decoding. Overall, it was pretty impressive to see all that being done in real-time without substantially impacting the rest of the game.

The real constraint in o

Re:35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Dutch Gun]

That's sadly a byproduct of how game engines are developed, I'm afraid. For the most part, game engines originate from graphics engine (so just graphics and then stuff tacked onto it), which means the vast majority of programmers working on the engine will be either generalist programmers or graphics programmers. In both cases, it's unlikely that they'll know how to deal with audio in any real capacity (I know I don't), so they'll use the same model that graphics uses: pushing commands.

Now, I'm sure that the larger devs have dedicated sound engineers, but I'm not sure just how much leeway they have with designing (and most likely, scrapping and completely redoing) the sound engine. It's also likely that their bosses will come from either a managerial background or a generalist programming or graphics programming background. Game development could use more specialists and needs to give them the flexibility they need.

Audio programming specialists like me are rare, but not unheard of. For most games, though, using a commercially available 3rd party engine is not only sufficient but probably preferred. So, the "audio programming" one is likely to do is mostly a case of resource management and integration with game development tools. It's the same reasoning as to how most games don't really require a custom-built game engine anymore - it's probably best left to the most specialized of games.

In my case, I was able to build a custom audio engine from scratch (yes, throwing away our old one) on top of the low-level audio API FMOD provides, but I think that's probably fairly rare nowadays, and for fairly good reasons. Our game was massive in scope, and had some pretty specific audio requirements and constraints, so it made sense to do this. I'd be pretty surprised if Titanfall had the sort of extreme requirements that we had, though, so they could probably get away with doing this. The fact that they could even fit all the uncompressed audio in a reasonable space demonstrates that there actually wasn't a lot of audio to begin with, at least not compared to the monster I was working on.

BTW, pushing commands works just fine for audio engines. In fact, it's the only sane way to do things at the high-level API, because that lets you efficiently and safely queue commands across a thread boundary. You're probably talking about push-vs-pull model audio processing, which is a complete non-issue, because game programmers almost never get down to that level of detail in the audio code. That's entirely handled by the low-level audio engine.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[Billly Gates]

You know many of us have this little thing called a budget. The landlord, student loans, bank, exwife, kids, food, gas all take higher precedence. I bought my second 238 gb Samsung PRo and I am already having buyers guilt as I am looking at bills due.

I have VM's for work on these drivers that are hundreds of gigs. A 50 gig game is frankly unacceptable nor is loading audio tracks and maps on the backup mechanical driver. Star wars the old republic had a level )corella) that takes 4 minutes to load on the mechanical drive and the fact some VMs had to be moved to the mechanical is why I bought the second drive.

I also still have a 2010 era phenom II x6 (at least 6 cores) and only a modest upgrade to an ATI 7850. This was all due to financial constraints which I feel I overspent heavily for this as it is :-(

I am not alone as 40% of all new jobs created are at Walmart, McDonalds, dollar stores, etc according to statistics. I am thankful I make more than $10/hr as these poor saps but they are all competing with me for jobs as they get A+ got to night schools for certs etc.

Not everyone makes $60,000 a year and is single and has their student loans paid off. If you are this congrats. But you are in a bubble and saying purchase more is ignorant of what resources other people have.

XP is still popular as many who have 10 year old computers are the ones who work at Walmart, barely make it each month, or live off social security retirement.

Re: 35 GB of uncompressed audio?

[khellendros1984]

Just make a symlink/junction and run it off a RAM drive. You can just dedicate half your 128GB memory to it and have still have 14GB or so free. Yeah, you have to wait half a minute to stream it from your NAS to the ramdrive, big whoop. If you don't have enough ram or a fast enough hard drive, drop down to a dual or triple SLI setup instead, n00b. :D

If you're going to do all that, you're better off causing an inverse feedback loop in the chroniton resonator coils and reversing the polarity of the tachyon emitters; otherwise you'll overload the power junctions and cause a data cascade failure in the isolinear relays, and you certainly don't want that.

I was wondering about that...

[John Pfeiffer]

Whatever the rationale for the uncompressed audio, I've got a 3.20GHz hexacore, and it has trouble sometimes. A couple rounds I've had the audio completely cock up from what I can only describe as it trying to play too many sounds at once...then just playing broken bits...then completely breaking down, requiring me to tough it out until the audio is reinitialized with the start of the next round.

I'd also like to note that it took me about 45 minutes to download the whole game, and a whole hour and a half for the installation...most of which was spent extracting the audio.

That said, the game is abso-fucking-lutely amazing and I love it. I need to fix the cooler on my other 6870 so I can put it back in, SLI the suckers, and turn the graphics up to 11. :D

Re:I was wondering about that...

[thegarbz]

Why do you need hardware acceleration for something that is so computationally insignificant?

Re:I was wondering about that...

[thegarbz]

I wonder how much your audio problems are the result of having to load the audio files and juggle them around in RAM? Where's it get the samples from? I hope not load them on the fly, and at the same time I hope not pre-load them.

There are many cases where compression can actually speed up things as reading and writing huge data is more expensive than doing a bit of maths on the much smaller result.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[danknight48]

A couple rounds I've had the audio completely cock up from what I can only describe as it trying to play too many sounds at once...then just playing broken bits...then completely breaking down, requiring me to tough it out until the audio is reinitialized with the start of the next round.

Sounds like the audio is running on a separate thread.
Most likely, the main audio parts are loaded at launch. The thread will then destroy and load current audio while the game is running, basically hot swapping.
The reason for the corruption is probably due to failed create/destroy requests, and didnt complete in the required time for the thread.
Either that, or they haven't made it truly thread safe. Could even be a simple case of the audio play request has been made and completed before the audio was destroyed and loaded into memory, hence, casing the corruption in audio playback.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Thanosius]

Impressive. It would take me just under 24 hours of constant, full-speed downloading before I'd manage to get 35GB.

Fuck you and your post internet connections! I say this in the nicest way possible of course, but it surprises me how much people under-appreciate what they have in terms of bandwidth.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[Imrik]

And yet none of those problems are fixed by using uncompressed audio.

Re:I was wondering about that...

[jones_supa]

And since most onboard solutions are realtek, you get what you pay for. Complete shit.

Complete shit?! May you elaborate? Realtek produces quite damn advanced stuff.

Piracy prevention?

[thegarbz]

The cynic in me wonders if the retarded idea of using uncompressed audio and not giving you the option to install just a subset such as the language of interest is some way of attempting to prevent piracy.

Maybe someone had the bright idea that people wouldn't bother trying to pirate that much data.

Maybe I'm just jaded.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[jones_supa]

Pirate groups are known to sometimes work around these issues. In this case they might rip away everything but English and tweak the game to still work. Then they might ship the audio compressed (MP3, for example) and a tool which does the conversion back to RIFF Wave (or whatever the game company is using). During the uncompression, that tool displays some pixel art animation and plays chiptune music, of course. ;)

Re:Piracy prevention?

[thegarbz]

Fiber is becoming the standard,

If you call select fortunate areas in select fortunate cities a standard then by all means. I know people who would breach their monthly download limit just getting this game.

Your type of connection is far from the "standard".

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, but perhaps he is not living in the US, so his statement about fiber becoming standard is actually true.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Opportunist]

Pirate groups do a lot of necessary cleanup already. For example, they made it possible to play the latest Sim City at release day, something that was not possible when you bought the game instead of copying it.

Re:Piracy prevention?

[Nyder]

Pirate groups do a lot of necessary cleanup already. For example, they made it possible to play the latest Sim City at release day, something that was not possible when you bought the game instead of copying it.

No piracy made the latest Sim City game playable at launch. Sad part is at least 4 idiots modded you up on false info.

Sim City was pirated a bit after launch, first I think by someone who figured out you didn't need to be connected to play, but still had no way to locally save files.

Not sure where it is at now, don't care really, but it was NOT pirated the day it was lauched, in fact, very few games are pirated the day they are launch, usually takes a few days.

1408x792

[jones_supa]

Why the odd 1408x792 resolution?

Re:1408x792

[Chris Mattern]

Why the odd 1408x792 resolution?

Presumably that's as far as they could dial it up without having the Xbone choke.

Re:1408x792

[thegarbz]

Per the article the Xbone is already choking and they are critical of the fact that they have the odd resolution with no real visible benefit while the game is unable to sustain 60fps.

The video is full of image tearing and stuttering.

Re:1408x792

[Opportunist]

Hmm... doing a factorization, you get 1408 = 2^7*11, 792 = 2^3*3^2*11

GCD would even be 2^3*11, i.e. 88. (resulting in 1408 / 88 = 16 and 792 / 88 = 9, i.e. 16:9).

Doesn't look that odd to me anymore, to be honest.

sad resolution

[sixsixtysix]

While I wasn't expecting 4k levels of resolution, that these new consoles aren't even pure 1080p/60 is pretty fucking pathetic.

Re:sad resolution

[AmiMoJo]

The PS4 usually manages 1080p/60. It's the XBone that is seemingly lacking.

Re:SSD

[Opportunist]

Erh... I have my SSD exactly FOR games. Why? Because contemporary games don't hold more than their bare minimum in ram, the rest (especially graphics, i.e. textures, map and model meshes, etc) is loaded when needed.

And yes, that stutters on a normal HD.

Nice but pointless for me

[nehumanuscrede]

I have a strong gaming rig and I won't bother with Titanfall for one simple fact: The PC version requires Origin to play it.

I tried it with Battlefield the last Battlefield game and it was such a trainwreck I uninstalled it and tossed the game in the trash before ever getting to play it. It went something like this:

Buy the physical media ( dvd ) install game. Try to play, find out you have to install Origin, cuss, install Origin, register and do all the BS required. Try to play, find out there is a multi GB PATCH to install before I can play, cuss some more, start download ( which takes HOURS coming from their servers ) finally get it all downloaded, try to play, discover my browser opens up instead of the game, Origin now wants to install some plugin to the damn browser. At which point I gave up from sheer anger and uninstalled the entire thing, Origin and all.

I put the Battlefield disc in the microwave then ran it through the shredder resolving to never again touch any game that had an Origin requirement.

So, Titanfall may be the most amazing game ever made but due to the Origin requirement, it is a game I will never play.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Please next time return the disk as it didn't work without requiring to download and install other things that didn't come on the disk. Probably no where on the box did it say you'd have to download more patches before the game would work. If the store doesn't take software returns, do a charge back on your credit card claiming the produce was defective (didn't contain everything needed to run) or didn't work as advertised.

Destroying the disk can be fun, but it doesn't send a message.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[ildon]

For starters, you already did the work of installing Origin and setting up an account. So even if you deleted Origin, you still already have an account so that work is a sunk cost. Second of all, you would have had to install that multi-gigabyte patch regardless of if Origin existed or not because you wouldn't have been able to connect to the game servers and play without it, so that has nothing to do with Origin. Third, the browser plugin is specific the the Battlefield Battle log feature. The game was designed to use a web browser as its server browser. It's something specific to BF and you would have had to do that to play it regardless of if Origin existed or not, and it's not a feature of Titanfall so you wouldn't have had to do that again to play Titanfall.

So right now, if you wanted to play Titanfall, your steps would be:
1. Install Origin.
2. Install Titanfall.
3. Log into Origin.
4. Possibly download a Titanfall patch (I don't know if there's a patch because I didn't buy it because I'm not a fan of CoD style shooters), which you would have had to do regardless of Origin's existence or non-existence.
5. Play.

That's it.

Seriously, 90% of your problems with "Origin" were problems with Battlefield.

Re: Nice but pointless for me

[nehumanuscrede]

Chuckle. Anyone who has been playing PC games ( and console games for that matter ) knows that within a month of launch, you can expect one or more patches to fix the product they rushed out the door to meet some deadline. Guaranteed.

I'm pretty much done with jumping through all the hoops for this. If you want to make it a pain in the ass just to play it, then I just won't play it. Pretty simple really.

Not that they care as they have legions of folks who are willing to put up with the BS to play at any cost, but in time they too will become jaded with the system and become ex-gamers as well.

Steam seems to have finally got it right in my opinion. I have zero issues with that platform now and the majority of my games come from there.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[Chryana]

I agree with most of what you said. With that said, I am really sick and tired of having to create an account on some service I don't care or need every time I buy a game. I already paid good money for the stupid game, but the greed of game distributors is endless. They probably milk the personal data they ask for for everything it's worth, and then they want to nickel and dime their customers to get every little trivial addition to the game, such as new players skins and weapons. Honestly, if buying a movie DVD was as complicated as installing a triple-A game, the movie business wouldn't be a tenth of the size of what it is right now. It's gotten to the point I have to write down a long list of made-up personal details, such as my birth date and address, and to create a disposable email address with every new login that I store in my password database. There is a need that the laws be changed to put a stop to the personal data collection which is being performed by all the big actors in the game industry.

Re:Nice but pointless for me

[Sibko]

I tried it with Battlefield the last Battlefield game and it was such a trainwreck I uninstalled it and tossed the game in the trash before ever getting to play it. It went something like this:

Buy the physical media ( dvd ) install game. Try to play, find out you have to install Steam, cuss, install Steam, register and do all the BS required. Try to play, find out there is a multi GB PATCH to install before I can play, cuss some more, start download ( which takes HOURS coming from their servers ) finally get it all downloaded, try to play, discover my browser opens up instead of the game...

About the only thing Steam doesn't require here, is a plugin for your browser.
Sorry, I just feel like pointing out the slag that other distribution systems seem to get when Steam does the exact same thing, or is worse. It reminds me of the kind of love Apple used to and still does get.

Re:It's not the hardware

[Kremmy]

You're wrong to begin with, but you're completely off the wall in this case because we're not really talking about different platforms, we're talking about the Xbox One and Windows. The Xbox One is an AMD APU PC, what kind of platform differences are you on about? the Xbox One is running a distribution of Windows. This is the point where any additional effort required means they did it wrong.

PC Master Race

[slashmydots]

Ooh surprise result...just kidding. But they did sort of bury the lead. It's a first person shooter game. Let me put it this way. If I'm steering a car in a game, I'd rather have a 16-level variable sensitivity joystick instead of a single state key on a keyboard. It's just more accurate and better. If I'm shooting a gun, pseudo-absolute positioning from a mouse beats the crap out of relative positioning from a joystick. Aiming a gun with a joystick is like driving a car with your ass instead of your hands. Yeah, you can sort of get it done and pretend you're good at it but if you were doing it the correct way, you'd do better.

So resolution, screen tearing, FPS, prettiness, all that is great and everyone knew PCs were faster but the game really crashes and burns when you consider the thumbsticks you're forced to use. That just simply is not how you control a gun.

My own view of Titanfall

[Kimomaru]

On Titanfall's release day, I posted a user review on Metacritic giving the game a zero, saying that I got a refund on Origin (they have a return policy for games, lucky me) and that I felt that the game was basically a super-modded Call of Duty - a sentiment that has been echoed even by more traditional gaming outlets. I also mentioned that when it comes to liking or disliking TItanfall, there are two types of players, 1) players who still enjoy Call of Duty and 2) players who don't. If you still enjoy the old CoD gaming formulas, give this game a try, otherwise pass on it. After a couple of days, the review was taken down, presumably because it was considered trolling? Not sure. I couldn't have been more honest.

Titanfall is not a great game, but opinion aside - some odd facts. Has anyone noticed that the textures on the PC version almost seem excessively low res? I find this particularly baffling. The other thing that troubles me is that Vincent Zampella aparently tweeted on October 29th that he wasn't aware that Titanfall was going to be an Xbox One exclusive until just then (http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/18380/article/titanfall-perpetually-a-microsoft-exclusive-respawn-unaware-ea-made-a-deal/). So, the only way he could have been unaware is that they were already working on a PS4 version and that the exclusivity deal announced in October quashed it. It just feels like a couple of these points kind of add up that Microsoft needed to make sure that it was exclusive and that the PC version wouldn't outshine the Xbox One version in the inevitable side-by-side comparisons. And, for its part, I must confess that I'm hard pressed to find much difference inthe Xbone-to-PC side-by-side videos.

In the end, I think the effort was wasted. There weren't many players broadcasting Titanfall on Twitch last night. And, as an avid gamer, it just feels like a lot of jockeying when versions of already-finished games are stopped with exclusivity contracts. I just can't get behind the Xbox One platform at all.