Titanfall

This page documents information about a game or software that is no longer available for purchase or download digitally.
It is covered here for historical and technical reference.
Additional note: Delisted from new purchases (both Steam & EA App). Existing customers can still play the game.

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Titanfall

Developer(s)

Respawn Entertainment
Bluepoint Games (Xbox 360 version)

Publisher(s)

Electronic Arts

Series

Titanfall series

Release date(s)

March 11, 2014 

Windows, Xbox One:
March 11, 2014
Xbox 360:
April 8, 2014

Genre(s)

First-person shooter

Mode(s)

Multiplayer

Platform(s)

Windows
Xbox One
Xbox 360

Engine

Source (Titanfall branch)

Steam AppID

1454890

Written in

C++

Mod support

No (officially)
Black Market Edition (unofficial)

System requirements

• OS: Win Vista SP2/7 SP1 64-bit
• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 2.8GHz
• RAM: 4 GB
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT/AMD Radeon HD 4770 with 512MB RAM or better (Direct3D 11, FL 10.0 capable)
• Network: Internet connection required
• Storage: 50 GB available space

Steam Deck compatbility

Playable

Distribution

Steam, EA App (formerly Origin)

Official website

Official Website

Links

Steam Store page (delisted)
EA App

Next game

Titanfall 2

Titanfall is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game, developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. On PC, the game was originally released on Origin (now EA App), but later released on Steam.

Titanfall runs on a heavily modified version of the Source Engine ( Titanfall engine branch), based off Portal 2 engine branch^[1], with modifications such as heavily modified BSP format, VPK package format, and an improved rendering engine. The sequels and spinoffs, Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends, both use this same engine, but more heavily modified and with various other improvements. The Xbox 360 version of Titanfall has additional changes, optimizations and released later, after the Windows and Xbox One versions, due to hardware limitations.

Respawn chose to use the Source engine for Titanfall and subsequent games as the co-founders and former Infinity Ward staff (who joined Respawn) are previously familiar with the heavily modified Quake 3 Engine (also known as id Tech 3) used in the Call of Duty series (called IW engine). Both IW engine and Source have code dating back to Quake (and have similar console commands, and share some similarity). Respawn also chose Source because Portal 2 performs well on PlayStation 3, and able to maintain 60 FPS on consoles (Xbox 360 version of Titanfall runs at uncapped 30-50FPS, with occasional 60 FPS, while Xbox One and PC runs at 60 FPS).

Later, a free to play version of Titanfall called  Titanfall Online, developed by Nexon for the Asian market, was launched in 2016 as an Open Beta, and later cancelled in 2018.

Titanfall (and all games on Titanfall branch) restricts typical Source engine features such as the developer console and server browser, but these can be re-enabled with offline mods.

In 2021, Titanfall is no longer available and has been delisted from Steam as the game servers has been DDoS attacked, leaving the game unplayable and the game was left unpatched with many known security vulnerabilities. The game received review bombing on Steam shortly before and after it got delisted. As of 2025, the DDoS attacks has been stopped, but the game is still unavailable to purchase, leaving only players who have already purchased the game prior to being delisted being able to play Titanfall.

Features

For more features, which are only available on Titanfall sequel and Apex Legends, see Titanfall engine branch.

Renderer

Direct3D 11 renderer

First Source engine game to render on Direct3D 11.

Cascaded Shadow Maps

Titanfall uses CSM, which cast very detailed shadows from the skybox.

TXAA anti-aliasing

TAA (aswell as TXAA, TSSAA or TSAA and other variant of TAA) is a new method of anti-aliasing which was common in later games since 2010s, as most games are transitioning from forward rendering to deferred rendering which allows many lights to be rendered with little performance impact. TAA is a anti-aliasing technique that works by combines information from past frames and the current frame (while simultaneously jittering between both frames) to smooth the current frame, this results in SSAA-like quality with significantly cheap performance impact comparing to other methods like MSAA, and works better with deferred rendering. Through it's main drawbacks is that it can cause ghosting and blurriness (basically creating motion blur with ghosting trails) to the image, especially on lower framerate or if it's poorly implemented (Example).

TXAA requires MSAA to function, unlike newer implementation of TAA in later Titanfall games.

64-bit support

First Source game to run on 64-bit natively, which improves performance and allows the engine to access more than 4GB of RAM. 32-bit are not supported.

Deferred shading

Allow many lights to be rendered on scene with little performance impact.

Network

New netcode

Audio system improvements

Speex audio codec

Titanfall uses Wwise sound system.

Texture streaming

Reduce system RAM and graphics card VRAM by streaming textures.

Better HDR Rendering

Improves the HDR (bloom) lighting.^[Clarify]

Customized version of BSP and VPK

Titanfall uses BSP version 29, with the BSP headers using rBSP (Respawn BSP) instead of VBSP as identifier. Titanfall also uses a custom version of VPK file format.

Next gen console support ( Xbox One)

Titanfall runs on 8th gen console, Xbox One, at 60FPS. Not useful to modders however.

Limitations

Important:Servers are down or frequently DDoSed since 2021 according to several reviews on Steam. As of 2025, the game is no longer suffering from DDoS attacks.

Warning:The mouse sensitivity for this game is tied to the framerate.

Gallery

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See also

• Titanfall branch

References

References

1. According to steam.inf and gameinfo.txt, the game contains a leftover SteamAppID (620) for Portal 2 as of March 2025 (both Titanfall 1 and 2). The AppID was likely left unchanged as both Titanfall and Titanfall 2 were originally released on Origin (now EA App), making "SteamAppID" unused. When R1Delta is installed, and launching Titanfall Dedicated Server, using version console command also confirms that the game uses Protocol version 2001, same as Portal 2. Also, most of the .vtf files inside the game's .vpk files are version 7.5, which were introduced in Alien Swarm engine branch..

External links

•  Titanfall (video game) on Wikipedia
• Black Market Edition Fan-made and open source modification for the game, that allows for basic mod-loading, as well as various security and quality of life fixes and improvements.