Titanfall 2 is receiving a fresh lease on life thanks to a new patch called Northstar, which allows PC gamers to build up their own private servers after months of suffering with hackers and DDoS assaults that left the game almost unusable.
Players may “run their own Titanfall 2 servers utilizing custom scripts and assets to generate unique content, as well as host vanilla content” using the Northstar mod. Importantly, it considerably minimizes the possibility of crippling server attacks: Although the same flaws exist, the servers themselves are effectively invisible.
“An attacker will have to trace down the server’s IP address if they wish to crash your server,” the SaveTitanfall Twitter account said. “It will be hard to hunt down and crash private games that are not on the main server.”
If everything went smoothly, you should receive a “thanks for installing Northstar” notice and be able to continue from there. Because Northstar does not launch through Origin, any current startup arguments will be lost, and you’ll have to manually add them to the ns startup args.txt file in the Northstar folder.
On the Titanfall subreddit, the response to the mod has been overwhelmingly positive. Console fans will obviously be dissatisfied, but PC players who have access to the mod appear to be enjoying it thus far.
Unfortunately, the chances of a comparable mod appearing in the original Titanfall are little to none. The Northstar mod connects into a server.dll in Titanfall 2, but because the original game doesn’t have a solo campaign or local server, enabling such functionality is significantly more difficult, according to SaveTitanfall operator Phoenix.
“Essentially, Respawn took their server code that was meant to run servers for multiplayer games and included it with the ordinary retail edition of Titanfall 2’s single player campaign,” they added. “They basically tweaked the server binary to make it easier to use in single player; most/all of the multiplayer infrastructure is still there in the campaign’s local server.”
“In order to integrate bespoke servers [in Titanfall], server software would have to be written from the ground up, rather than leveraging the server that Respawn has already created… It is conceivable, but it is really tough.”
Visit the Northstar Discord server for additional information or to connect with other members of the community.
