Call of the Wild: The Angler

Call of the Wild: The Angler expands Avalanche’s immersive outdoor universe with online co-op multiplayer for up to 12 players. While the experience centers on exploration and realism, the technical foundation relies on stable backend services and responsive gameplay networking.

For Avalanche’s Expansive Worlds division, the inclusion of online multiplayer introduced new scalability considerations:

• Registration and authentication reliability
• Matchmaking stability
• UDP-based gameplay networking
• Backend service performance under concurrency

Even in a slower-paced genre like fishing, networking instability can disrupt immersion. Avalanche required validation that core online systems would remain stable under real-world player load before release.

Cyrex conducted structured load testing across backend and gameplay services using Cyrex Swarm, our headless load simulation platform.

Rather than relying on full client instances, Swarm simulates player behavior at the network level. This allows for large-scale concurrency testing without hardware constraints.

Our engagement focused on simulating realistic player flows across critical systems, including:

• Registration
• Authentication
• Matchmaking
• UDP-based gameplay services

By replicating player connection sequences and multiplayer interactions, we evaluated how backend services responded under increasing load conditions.

Cyrex Swarm integrates directly with Unreal Engine and custom networking services, enabling realistic simulation of gameplay-level communication.

This allowed us to:

• Observe system behavior during multiplayer session formation
• Identify bottlenecks in authentication and matchmaking pipelines
• Evaluate UDP traffic handling during gameplay

Load simulations were structured to surface degradation points before players could encounter them in production.