Case Study: Alderon Games' Path of Titans

Key Highlights

• Path of Titans required game servers with high CPU requirements (4 GHz and above) to run their highly popular cross-platform MMO based on an 8km X 8km map filled with complex AI creatures and up to 200 other players.

• Edgegap’s platform allowed game developer Alderon Games to instantly leverage a custom pool of high-performance game servers across multiple providers worldwide.

• The platform enabled Alderon Games to run their backend in minutes rather than months, saving time and allowing them to prioritize valuable resources on game development.

• The platform also includes automated rolling updates (i.e., launch a new version without impacting players in ongoing games with an older version), fully managed game server lifecycle, automated player demand-driven scaling, compatibility with Alderon Games’ tools and services, in-depth custom analytics, and flexible roadmap.

• No upfront fees and flat rates ensured easy estimates of ongoing usage costs.

—

The Studio

Alderon Games is an independent game studio that is based in Australia. The crew at Alderon mixes strong technical skills with creativity and innovation to create the games they’ve always dreamed of playing.  With a stated commitment to cross-platform play and modding, their Unreal Engine expertise has already produced a fan-favorite MMO that delivers on that promise.  

Path of Titans’ vision is to provide a framework for dinosaur enthusiasts to roleplay as their favourite prehistoric beasts. It also provides powerful modding tools to help the community shape the future of the MMO’s world into player-specific adventures.

The Challenge

Path of Titans required game servers with high CPU requirements, namely a minimum of 4 GHz, to be able to run their highly popular, cross-platform MMO due to their large map area being filled with complex AI creatures and up to 200 players.

With a strong team of developers, the team wanted to prioritize game development given the ambitious nature of building an expansive community-server-owned MMO. To support this vision, Alderon Games needed to carefully pick the tools, services, and partners essential to craft their game and meet its unique requirements, providing them with the ability to stay on time and within budget.

The Solution

Edgegap’s robust yet deeply customizable solution was critical for Alderon Games’ primary challenge of high-performance game server requirements.

The automated and distributed cloud network solution Edgegap’s platform offers was a perfect fit: Already compatible with Alderon Games’ other tools and having the ability to instantly leverage a custom pool of high-performance game servers across multiple providers worldwide. This enabled Alderon Games to have their backend run in minutes rather than months of tedious work, enabling them to funnel valuable development resources on game dev.

Additionally, Path of Titans gained key benefits translating into an ideal player and developer experience:

1. Performance

   • Latency is much more than a number; it can catastrophically impact player experience, leaving the players dejected or outraged. Automated game server orchestration tapping into 550+ locations ensure optimal latency for players worldwide regardless of their locality through proximity hosting of persistent game server instances.

   • Persistent game servers hosting up to 200 players in a large map area in the Unreal Engine often means specific requirements in terms of CPU clock speed and RAM. Edgegap offered Alderon Games access to dozens of locations worldwide that fit their restrictive criteria based on a multi-cloud, multi-baremetal single point of integration.

   • The Path of Titans team can easily launch new versions with specific parameters, such as varying max player count or different maps, based on Edgegap’s versioning system linked to their CI/CD pipeline.

   • The Edgegap deployment tagging system means the Alderon team can easily find logs associated with specific deployments, for debugging and performance monitoring purposes

2. Resiliency

   • Disruption in services such as outages or, more critically, DDoS attacks can heavily impact the play experience of an MMO with persistence instances. Edgegap’s 550+ locations across 17+ providers ensure game servers are always accessible.

3. Simplicity

   • A fully managed backend makes it easy for Alderon Games’ developers. Automation ensures game servers are managed from start to stop, just in time, throughout its lifecycle for an effortless backend production. Providing resource optimization minimizes costs for a session-based MMO.

   • An additional benefit includes automated rolling updates. Namely, it allows Alderon Games’ Ops team to containerize and launch a new version without impacting players in ongoing games with an older version. It is closed when the older instance is finished, and new players are seamlessly added to the latest version.

   • Based on Edgegap’s deployment tagging system, Path of Titans players can select the game instance that best fits their needs or be placed automatically  in the best location based on their network telemetry.

   • Compatibility with Alderon Games’ tools and services and in-depth custom analytics helped the team develop and operate their game faster and more efficiently.

4. Efficiency: Having a platform all set for production gave the studio the upper hand in focusing on game development. They could tap into cutting-edge solutions on the market without upfront expenses or having to hunt down the rare engineers in ops and backend.

5. Support: The developers at Edgegap were an ever-present resource, providing insights and fixes to support Alderon Games on Discord and through voice or video chats when needed despite the time zone differences.

6. Pricing: Alderon Games found comfort in the absence of any initial fees and the straightforward "pay per minute" charges, which made cost estimation and control a breeze.

Conclusion

Path of Titans is a massive MMO success story and speaks volumes to the ability of independent developers to develop and operate live service games at the same level as the industry’s most prominent players when utilizing the proper partners and external solutions deftly.