The Titanfall 2 multiplayer “tech test” is coming soon, but PC gamers will have to sit this one out.

Following their 2014 debut with Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment announced the sequel to their mech-based competitive FPS at E3 2016. Titanfall 2 expands on its predecessor with a full single-player campaign, and an arsenal of new gadgets, Pilot armor upgrades, and brand new Titans. While the original released exclusively for Microsoft consoles and PC, Titanfall 2 brings the series into Sony territory with a PS4 release alongside the Xbox One and PC versions later this year.

Respawn CEO Vince Zampella released an update this morning regarding the upcoming multiplayer “tech test” for Titanfall 2; as Zampella put it on Twitter, the upcoming test isn’t so much a “Beta”, as an active server stress test. Unlike the previous multiplayer Beta for Titanfall, the upcoming event will only be available for PS4 and Xbox One players; PC gamers will not have a tech test nor actual Beta prior to the game’s launch in October. According to the statement, the decision to forgo a PC tech test is due to a current lack of hardware compatibility. In its current state, Titanfall 2 has not been tested with the large array of PC hardware configurations; Respawn Entertainment still needs to do “enough work to fully support [their] ‘Min Spec’ on PC”.

The test will be dropped from PC also to avoid the potential for data-mining- a deep search through a game’s assets. As seen with Batman: Arkham Knight, Street Fighter X Tekken and the most recent example No Man’s Sky, data-mining can potentially yield spoilers towards the story, reveal unused content, or hint at future DLC.

“Two big issues from a development standpoint: hardware variety & ‘min spec’ optimization. We’re still making a lot of tweaks and changes to the renderer, the game, and effects so we haven’t run the game through the hardware compatibility lab yet to detect and handle a large variety of hardware – video cards, CPUs etc. Quite frankly, we aren’t ready to deal with that yet, we are still making the game better. We also haven’t done enough work to fully support our ‘Min Spec’ on PC yet. So, currently the PC game isn’t as easy to throw out for testing as the console is, because of the additional variables and configurations that we need to support. Also, because the single player story has some wonderful secrets that we really want to preserve for launch, we also have to worry about leaks.  Our wonderfully curious PC players have proven in the past that they will dig out anything they can, and there’s a risk that they could spoil some of our single player.

We realize this is a big disappointment for our PC fans, but we feel this allows us to concentrate on the real purpose of the tech test and focus on the server stability and scalability. Rest assured we’re confident in our ability to deliver a great PC experience for launch. We appreciate your understanding, and we look forward to seeing everyone on The Frontier this October.”

An official date for the console-exclusive multiplayer test has not been given, however Zampella assures fans to “keep the next two weekends free“.

Titanfall 2 will release for PC, Xbox One and PS4 on 10/28. A “Deluxe Edition” containing extra DLC content is available to pre-order across all platforms, however two Collector’s Editions are available exclusively for the console versions.

Source: Respawn Entertainment
Image courtesy of Respawn Entertainment