Digital Foundry: What about the Azure hook-up - it looks like you're using the cloud in the same way as the Xbox One and PC versions?
Andy O'Neill: Yep, exact same as Xbox One/PC, aside from some minor back-end changes for encryption, and those grunts we spared from an unpleasant death in Last Titan Standing mode.
Digital Foundry: Grunt NPC AI is taken care of by the server. To what extent does that free up local CPU resources? Does that make more of a difference on Xbox 360, where you have less CPU available compared to PC and Xbox One?
Andy O'Neill: I'm not a network programmer so take all of this with a pinch of salt.
So, it does help quite a bit, though we're mostly CPU-limited and even the overhead of packet processing and simulation is a hit on Xbox 360.
I think the big deal with having a dedicated server is that you wouldn't even try to make this game using a standard peer-to-peer model, at least on console.
The server performance requirements for Titanfall are pretty high, so you can't run peer-to-peer. This also means you can't have a many virtual machines per physical server, meaning if you've got a popular game, then you're going to need a pretty big investment in server hardware.
So, this is kinda hard to explain in a 'the power of the cloud' soundbite, but using Thunderhead actually makes a lot of sense as it allows pooled resources to spin up and down for a given title rather than having to figure out some way to get some ungodly amount of servers for a day one launch player spike. I think you'll see more interesting multiplayer games because of this but it'll take a while.