Two new stories have come out of the world of Titanfall today, concerning two types of people: Pirates and South Africans. Wow, there’s a real unintended link there. … now I feel like a racist.
Anyway, back to the news. If you look hard enough, you can probably find a Mom and Pop shop that will sell you a Titanfall copy before street date. Many game developers seek to ban these early adopters for being able to post videos and screenshots of their game before the company allowed. This has led to numerous premature bad reviews, especially when it comes to games that are supported by their online play. Most of the time, official servers are not ready ahead of a game’s official launch, which can cause unexpected errors.
However, the Titanfall team at Respawn Entertainment doesn’t particularly care about people playing early. The servers still aren’t ready, and cofounder Vince Zampella has gone on record saying that there may be several interruptions in service, but the company won’t ban, block, or otherwise punish people who manage to get a legit game early. Note, they did make it clear that they were talking about legit copies. Internet pirates who simply downloaded or burned a copy of their game may still need to watch their backs. Even having an unlocked system may get you banned from Xbox Live.
Speaking of Xbox Live, it’s instrumental in making sure that Titanfall can even run. The game, if you remember, is an online only affair, so anyone with a bad internet connection is basically missing out. Unfortunately, this means that entire regions of the world aren’t being invited to the Titanfall party.
South Africa is one region who is on this do not invite list. According to EA, network performance in the region simply isn’t good enough. Zampella commented on this problem on twitter saying “Performance wasn’t as good in the area as we would like; don’t want to sell you something that isn’t great.”
Unfortunately, this is coming off as a bit of a slap in the face to some South African gamers. The Titanfall beta was available in South Africa on PC, so the region did get a taste of it. Fans have already launched a Change.org petition asking EA and Respawn to release the game in the region, and they may be in luck. Zampella has said that a South African release isn’t out of the question, especially if they can up network performance. He said that the team would likely “look further into it after launch.
Titanfall officially launches on March 11 th for the Xbox One and PC. An Xbox 360 version will arrive on March 25 th .