Game Director Stig Asmussen recently posted to Respawn Entertainment's website that “I am happy to announce our partnership with Electronic Arts and Lucasfilm to deliver a whole new adventure to the galaxy.” Asmussen says that the company has begun work on a third-person Star Wars action-adventure title, and posted the announcement partially to make a call to talent for hire.

Respawn is known almost exclusively for Titanfall and is a studio founded by former Infinity Ward executives Vince Zampella and Jason West. With an expansive game making history, to include Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (recently remastered), Respawn believes it will herald the “exemplary level of quality first established at Respawn with Titanfall, a game that epitomizes our studio's dedication to […] groundbreaking mechanics.”

Game news this week kicks off the sequel to a game no one remembers. EA confirmed Titanfall 2 with a teaser trailer this week, announcing at the same time that the game would be on display in some form at their Play Event during E3. EA’s Play Event starts on June 12, and was set up because the company is skipping E3. So far, no other details have come out about the game, but you can expect to hear more about it in June.

Some sad news for many World of Warcraft fans this week. The popular private server Nostalrius, was shut down on April 10th. This comes following a cease and desist from Blizzard Entertainment. The Nostalrius server has allowed players to keep playing vanilla WoW as it was 13 years ago, pre-expansion, and is somewhat similar to Project 99 for EverQuest. Before being shut down, Nostalrius had over 150,000 active players. To signify the ending of the server, players got together to travel from the orc capital Orgrimmar to the Thunder Bluff cliffs -- where they jumped to their deaths. In addition, many attempted to stream the server’s final moments; however, the private server violated Twitch.Tv’s terms of service, and so to were the streams shutdown.

We just reported on WD & Seagate's fiscal year 2Q16 earnings, both hard drive companies showing a decline in both revenue and income. Not to be left behind, publicly-held EA Games recently released its shareholder earnings call transcript with a roadmap for the next year.

The company is currently developing and publishing “Mass Effect 4” (official title – Mass Effect: Andromeda), the next Battlefield game, and “Titanfall 2” (name TBD). All three series will deliver their refreshments in 2017, with Titanfall and Mass Effect updating prior to 2Q17 (before April). Titanfall 2 is known to be multi-platform and will retain its focus on fast-paced, parkour-inspired gameplay.

We've never covered a game more extensively than we did Titanfall; it was the first game featured in our individualized video card benchmarks, we wrote crash fix guides to mitigate rampant bugs in beta, and produced a Last Titan Standing strategy guide for fans of the mode. The game has long been a bit of a shortcoming in my eyes, though; it wants desperately to be a twitch shooter, and yet so many things are wrong -- like the weaponset (should be more explosive, like in Unreal Tournament) and lack of a server browser. Once again, PC gamers have been handed a console interface and been told to toddle off and have fun.

Respawn Entertainment today hosted a Titanfall panel featuring CEO Vince Zampella and Lead Designer Justin Hendry, each working to deliver key information pertaining to the game's future objectives. Prior to PAX East, Respawn released their first title update for Titanfall on the XBOX One and PC. This patch included small changes as well as the first big change—something that the community was very interested in having—which was private matches.

There's been a lot of discussion about Titanfall's performance lately. Our most recent Titanfall GPU performance benchmark showed that the game still exhibits serious issues on certain devices; nVidia cards showed severe stuttering, SLI has micro-stuttering and works better disabled, and the game is simply needlessly large. All these taken into account, the performance issues feel almost unjustified for the visuals -- the game looks fine, sure, but it's not melt-your-GPU level of graphics and certainly isn't spectacular to look at. It's another Source Engine game with adequate graphics. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, so please don't get me wrong -- just that the performance isn't perfectly-tuned, at least, not yet. More drivers and patches will smooth that out.

I don't want to come off as too harsh, though. The mechanics are enjoyable for certain types of players and the game overall seems 'good,' it's just experiencing some (now-standard) launch issues with PC optimization. All is survivable, though.

Titanfall's official launch brings us back to the topic of video card performance in the Source Engine-based game. When we originally benchmarked how various video cards performed in Titanfall, we clearly noted that the pre-release state of the game and lack of official driver support likely contributed to SLI microstuttering, CrossFire catastrophic failure, and overall odd performance. We're now back with a full report using the latest beta drivers (with Titanfall profiles and support) and the full version of the game.

In this Titanfall PC video card benchmark, we look at the FPS of the GTX 760, GTX 650 Ti Boost, GTX 750, R9 270X, R7 260X, 7850, the A10-5800K 7660D APU, and Intel's HD4000. I threw a GTX 580 in there for fun. Our thanks to MSI for providing the 750, 260X, and 270X for these tests. 

If you're trying to play Titanfall a bit before everyone else, using a virtual private network to connect through Korean servers will land you in the game about 13 hours before anyone in the US. By using a VPN, we can spoof the Origin servers to think that the host computer is located in Korea, which will enable the host system to decrypt and unpack Titanfall's install files.

With only eight days until giant fighting robots take over our lives, more information has leaked about Titanfall. Reddit user FallenFusion has expanded on the information that NeoGAF user RazorUK was able to dig out of the beta, sharing some exciting details and new screenshots yesterday. For those of you who've missed RazorUK's leaks, we're going to include those below in addition to the new information and images provided by Fusion; this Titanfall leaks round-up will compile all the relevant information about maps, turrets, generations, ziplines, and pilot hunter.

Before we begin, you might also be interested in these other Titanfall articles we've published lately:

• Titanfall GPU Benchmark
• $506 Cheap Bastard's Titanfall PC Build
• $797 Mid-Range Titanfall PC Build
• Titanfall Last Titan Standing Strategy Guide
• Titanfall to take 48GB of Storage

When we benchmarked Titanfall on video cards recently, it was clear that the game's beta was just old enough that it was completely sub-optimized for PC performance; as drivers are released and the game is completed, we hope to see significant performance improvements over the beta. The Source engine shouldn't require a 760 to run smoothly, but we'll see how that goes soon enough.

In the meantime, Respawn Entertainment's Vince Zampella just announced via twitter that Titanfall will require 48GB of storage on the PC. Zampella stated in his tweet: