The new Northstar mod promises to give EA's long-suffering shooter a new lease of life.
After months of battling hacks and DDoS attacks that made the game nearly unplayable at times, Titanfall 2 is getting a second life through a new mode called Northstar that lets players set up their own private servers on PC.
The Northstar mod allows Titanfall 2 players to “host vanilla content as well as host their own Titanfall 2 servers using custom scripts and assets to create custom content.” More importantly, it also greatly reduces the risk of weakening attacks against servers: The same vulnerabilities exist, but the servers themselves are effectively off the radar.
“If an attacker wants to take down your server, they will have to trace the server's IP address,” the SaveTitanfall Twitter account said. “It will be impossible to track down and crash private games that are not on the main server.”
Github isn't the friendliest distribution platform in the world, but explained here The installation process is actually pretty simple like:
- Download the latest version from the versions page
- Copy all the files from the newly downloaded zip folder to your Titanfall folder
- for Steam – Right click Titanfall 2 > Open Properties > Click Local Files > Click Browse
- for Origin – Click Titanfall 2 in the library > Click the Gear icon > Click Game Properties
- Start NorthstarLauncher.exe to start Northstar
Assuming everything went well, you'll see a “Thanks for installing Northstar” message and you can continue from there. However, note that since Northstar does not start via Origin, existing launch arguments will not persist; you will need to add them manually to the ns_startup_args.txt file in the Northstar folder.
The response to the mod in the Titanfall subreddit has been very positive. Console gamers are understandably disappointed, but PC gamers with access to the mod seem to be having a great time with it so far.
Unfortunately, the possibility of a mod similar to the original Titanfall is very remote. dll for Titanfall 2's single-player campaign, SaveTitanfall operator Phoenix has revealed that it uses a server.
“Basically what Respawn did for Titanfall 2's single-player campaign was to take the server codes used to host the servers for the multiplayer games and add that to the regular retail version of the game,” they explained. “They've made some changes to the server binary for easy use in single player; Most/all of the multiplayer infrastructure is still there on the local server used for the campaign.
“For custom servers to be implemented [in Titanfall], the server software would have to be implemented from scratch, while Respawn would have to use the server already made… It is possible but very difficult.”
For more information or to connect with other members of the community Go to Northstar Discord server.