Respawn hunting down Titanfall cheaters

One of the sad truths of online gaming is that cheaters often prosper. Titanfall developer Respawn is working to stop those people in its popular sci-fi shooter.

The studio reported that it is finding cheaters in its game. It plans to start rooting them out, but it didn’t explain when that will happen or how. Respawn launched Titanfall for Xbox One and PC earlier this week to great anticipation. In the first days following the multiplayer-only title’s launch, the developer focused on quickly fixing server issues to keep it up and running. Now that it knows it has a stable product, Respawn can start worrying about things like cheaters. So far, cheating is only affecting PC.

Finding cheaters in Titanfall? So are we. We're logging them now and they will be rooted out shortly.

— Respawn (@Respawn) March 13, 2014

Cheaters in games like Titanfall often use supplemental software to improve their abilities. That includes things like aimbots, which will automatically move a player’s crosshairs over an enemy’s head in an instant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkF5vtt9oTY

Respawn confirmed that players are using aimbots in Titanfall.

Preventing cheating is important to the success of Titanfall. The title has no single-player mode, which means that individuals must rely on strangers to provide part of the game experience. If some of those people are cheating, it could ripple through the community and turn off legit players.

While this is Respawn’s first release, many Call of Duty developers make up the staff. Specifically, the people from this team worked on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Hackers and cheaters plagued both of those titles on all platforms. It’s possible that Respawn will have an easier time fighting it in this release because Titanfall runs exclusively on Microsoft’s Xbox cloud servers. That should make it more difficult for would-be cheaters to run bots and scripts — or, at least, it should make it easier for Respawn to eliminate those issues.