Medal of Honor

From the start, Respawn planned to concentrate on gameplay while using off-the-shelf components and services wherever possible for back-end and networking tasks. For MOHAB, the team was responsible for building a AAA experience for an enormous global audience with high expectations. Respawn’s title would represent a new level of multiplayer VR games for the breakthrough Oculus Quest device.

Respawn first tapped Multiplay’s auto-scaling hybrid-cloud technology for Titanfall 2 in 2016. Critics acclaimed its multiplayer performance, and Respawn entrusted the franchise’s next incarnation, Apex Legends, to Multiplay as well. Their decision was instantly vindicated when the shooter launched to explosive success – during the launch’s peak, the orchestration layer was spinning up more than 3,000 cores per minute with 6,500 virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud across 54 locations. Multiplay scaled seamlessly, leveraging global bare-metal and public cloud resources to serve up Apex Legends to 50 million players in 24 days and handle over 2 million concurrent users (CCU).

For managing network infrastructure with MOHAB, Respawn knew Multiplay’s instrumentation, how to deploy it, and what it would cost. It was a known quantity, and it filled in all of Respawn’s checkboxes. And because the development team easily understood its inner workings and clear API, they saved an enormous amount of development time. 

Another vitally important factor in choosing Multiplay was the confidence they had in the support team. Anticipating they would hand off live-ops after launch, Respawn knew that Multiplay would be a trusted partner for Facebook/Oculus.

Respawn went to Unity for matchmaking for the same reason it chose Multiplay: to let their developers focus on gameplay rather than infrastructure. And because it’s so tightly integrated with Multiplay, Unity Matchmaker (currently in closed beta) can consistently deliver an optimized distribution of players worldwide with diverse server resources.

Two factors stood out for Respawn when they evaluated Unity Matchmaker. The match logic was highly customizable, letting the team take out-of-the-box functions and quickly alter them to their exact needs to balance skills, parties, and server resources. They could control how Matchmaker filled servers to optimize the VR experience, backfilling, allocating, and deallocating dynamically. They didn’t have to wait for an external team to make tweaks.

In VR, the body is the controller, and voice multiplies VR’s immersive effect. Although voice chat has become a basic feature in virtually all multiplayer games, its implementation for VR is still maturing. A lot of processing occurs on the client side, and many voice over IP (VoIP) services can only handle a small number of players – particularly if they use a peer-to-peer approach. 

Engine-agnostic Vivox, the third Unity Multiplayer Service that Respawn brought on for MOHAB, could handle the load. It’s been proven at scale with over 120M monthly active users (MAU) and 99.9%+ uptime, and it seamlessly supports cross-play on all platforms. This was another example of where Respawn went for a plug-and-play, off-the-shelf solution and let their team focus on what they do best – gameplay.

“Gameplay first” is Respawn’s byword, and their mission is clear: “Every detail is crafted with purpose, and all of our development disciplines contribute towards creating an incredible gameplay experience for our players.” 

From their first title, Respawn has partnered with Unity so they can focus their skills on stories and games, letting Unity Multiplayer Services deliver back-end components and services. This approach helps enable creativity and levels the playing field for any studio, from the smallest indie to a AAA like Respawn.