It's been a less than ideal week for Respawn Entertainment, who has seen an uptick in hacks impact a number of its games. The studio had to cut short it's Fourth of July holiday this past Sunday as one hacker kicked off what they called Operation Red Tape, by taking over Apex Legends and attempting to bring awareness to the rough state that the PC version of Titanfall is currently in due to DDoSing. The hacker changed the message of the day, playlist names, and more to attempt to bring awareness to the issues facing Titanfall.
After spending a solid six hours testing and applying a fix, Apex Legends was finally restored to its original state prior to the hacking. Now the studio has been able to get back to fighting the rampant use of cheats in Apex Legends' Ranked Mode, though it also provided a slight update that the original Titanfall as well. Respawn's Ryan Rigney confirmed that the studio has never stopped working on the issue, it's just taking longer than expected. Unfortunately, the problem that is DDoS has expanded once more, this time to Titanfall 2.
Player reports on social media locations like the Titanfall 2 subReddit have begun to indicate that matches on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have begun to be impacted by an all new round of distributed denial of service attacks. This has seemingly impacted everything including matchmaking, Frontier Defense, and the rest of the online suite of modes. Players have seen everything from Titanfall 2 matches getting hit with big spikes of lag, to being sent back to the menus in the middle of a match. While the annoyances started off relatively small, things are continuing to get progressively worse with each day.
At this point in time, Respawn has yet to comment on the latest hacker strike, though it has certainly left the community shaken and frustrated. People have taken to venting online, while others lament the fact that this fan favorite game is now rendered unplayable and worried that the community will end up dying off completely if not fixed sooner than later. Considering how long Titanfall on PC has gone without a fix for similar issues, many fans concerned Titanfall 2 will befall a similar fate and rendered unplayable.
The timing of these issues couldn't be worse as EA is planning to kick off its month long Spotlight Series events leading up to EA Play in a few weeks. Ironically, Respawn will be joined by members of DICE to discuss the future of shooters like Battlefield 2042 and Apex Legends. While any Titanfall related news isn't expected at this panel, many fans are hoping for Respawn to address the recent uptick in hacking and a path forward.
