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Last week, Electronic Arts contacted us asking whether we'd be interested in talking with Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker to discuss the more technical elements of its new gaming behemoth, Titanfall. It's sort of opportunity we can't ignore for obvious reasons, but as well as tackling the key technological issues, this was a chance to find out what went on behind the scenes in one of the year's most high-profile gaming events - the release of the Titanfall beta. Our vision of a networked hub flooding with incoming data turned out to be just one element of the developer's surveillance - Respawn was literally watching people playing its beta with an unexpected use of a recent revolution in gaming."Most of the guys here were watching Twitch TV a lot actually, seeing the expressions of the various people that were streaming while they were playing the beta, seeing what they were saying, watching what they did," Richard Baker tells us. "It's kind of great, like watching over their shoulders the first time they play the game. And lots of people were streaming, it was a different experience - sometimes people do things that you don't expect."
It's an interesting idea - direct observation of a vast number of people playing your game, complete with real-time feedback from even more observers. But beyond the audience reaction, this was a technological stress test - a means to put Microsoft's Azure cloud system through its paces.
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