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The mech-shooter sequel embarks on its boldest campaign yet: to bring you a story.
Hungry alien animals in paradise, a planet like Pandora from Avatar. A Titan as our buddy and a level design that feels like Titanfall meets Half-Life. What’s going on here? Well, if Valve don't want to give us Half-Life 3, other devs can give it a shot with some smart, fast-paced physics puzzles. We've visited Respawn Entertainment in Los Angeles, spent an entire day with Titanfall 2 and met with the campaign lead designer who has a very interesting story to tell.
And, naturally, we also got our hands on the multiplayer which is coming with free DLC on PS4, PC and Xbox One. Certainly an interesting decision in an age and time where Activision made a reported billion dollars in the last quarter with DLCs for Destiny, Call of Duty and in-game purchases within Overwatch. Respawn, though, love to do things a bit differently. Let's start this feature with everything you need to know about the single player, the original Titanfall’s major weak point.
The solo campaign: A Titan and his buddy in paradise hell
Respawn know they’re onto something unique with Titanfall. The beautiful mix of almost acrobatic first-person shooting, combined with the raw power of giant mechanical robots makes it unlike any other game. And while the first game proved popular with fans, the lack of a story mode ultimately hurt the game's mass appeal. So when the team set out to develop an original story mode for the sequel, there was a problem. It would be a genuine waste if they simply added robots to a normal first-person shooter story mode and called it a day.
“For quite a while dev teams thought new games need an MMO experience and loot like in Borderlands, The Division or Destiny. That’s not our style, we are huge fans of Wolfenstein and Doom”, says producer and studio co-founder Drew McCoy during the preview. He argues that because of how unique the controls are, for both the pilot and Titan, it was important to emphasise their unique traits. Pilots – who can jet around in suits, run on walls and zip line through the air – needed challenging, almost puzzle-like environments to run through. And the Titans, due to their size, needed large spaces to fully manoeuvre.
For quite a while dev teams thought new games need an MMO experience and loot like in Borderlands, The Division or Destiny. That’s not our style, we are huge fans of Wolfenstein and Doom
“I've worked large parts of my career on Call of Duty and I still love this series, but we want Titanfall’s campaign to be different: more creative, more parkour-driven and with a design that triggers a puzzle-like experience," agrees senior designer Mohammad Alavi, when we meet him for a longer interview at the studio.
Alavi is originally from Iran, having had to flee the war, and is responsible for some of the most memorable missions for Call of Duty. A veteran of the industry, he kicked off his career at Infinity Ward and was responsible for All Ghillied Up, a sniper operation from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, where you have to hunt down Imran Zakhaev. It was a surprisingly calm, but extremely tense, mission and most gamers would probably vote it today as best one in any Call of Duty. Yet, he reveals, he now takes most inspirations from games with a heavy narrative like BioShock or Wolfenstein.
The first Titanfall kind of had a story and a couple of cutscenes, but it was lacking depth and in general wasn't a great fit for a multiplayer experience, Alavi admits.
“Yes, I would agree with that. It was a very interesting trial and error process for us that we've learned a lot from. Multiplayer is very fast. There is no break, no moment of silence. It's super hard to transfer any emotions within a classic multiplayer mode. But we want exactly that: we want you to feel the growing friendship between a Titan, which is basically a piece of technology with an AI on top, and a human."
We want you to feel the growing friendship between a Titan, which is basically a piece of technology with an AI on top, and a human
Things start off with a bang in our demo: snarling teeth lurk over us, we hear some lips smacking and realise we’re soon to be lunch for this ferocious alien. With a yellow crown and a blue body it reminds us of something out of Avatar, perhaps a particularly disgruntled Thanator.
We don't have our gun and we are barely conscious, the whole screen is washed out. Luckily our Titan, endearingly called BT-7274, rescues us with a couple of shots. Bad dog!
We then learn our protagonist is Jack Cooper, an ordinary soldier, and rifleman of the militia. Our ship, the MCS James MacCallan (Titanfall veterans will remember that name) was en route to the planet Typhon when we were ambushed by the IMC, the Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation. Wait, who were these guys again?
IMC versus Militia: The Empire versus the Rebels
"To make it easier: It's a bit like Star Wars and the IMC is the evil empire," explains Alavi. "But it's more complex than that: The IMC is an industrial manufacturing and mining empire that invests a lot of money into the settling of planets outside Earth, which they call Frontier. Turns out though that these planets are hosting a huge variety of resources and are extremely profitable."
In the first Titanfall the IMC decided to take whatever they wanted from the colonies and effectively declared Martial Law over the entirety of the frontier. Because the core systems, the planets in the direct neighborhood of Earth, needed these resources to sustain their consumer lifestyle, they got the backing from the government and invaded the colonies.
The settlers fought back, built up a huge militia army with their own Titan program and an entire fleet. We were on one of these ships but the MCS James MacCallan is no more. It's in flames and totally destroyed, with corpses of our comrades scattered around everywhere, serving as a buffet lunch for the alien wildlife on this planet.
Time to get a weapon, in other words, or even better, into our very own Titan, which is a tank on legs with a giant Gatling in hand and rocket pods on the shoulders. But BT-7274’s battery got damaged, so it’s time to find a new one and discover this surprisingly lush valley of death. There are palms everywhere and waterfalls and the scenery is dominated by warm colours. It feels a world (or galaxy) away from the muddy bleen of Call of Duty or Battlefied ( bleen being our word to describe the general brown-green wash of every level in most first person shooters.)
"A couple of maps in Titanfall, like Backwater Bay, had some water elements too, but it was mostly about towns with an industrial-looking style or huge military installations. We want to change that, we want to surprise you,” Alavi says.
Respawn proceed to do just that, because a good 10 minutes of the demo is spent entirely without firing shots. Instead, we climb trees and wall-run rocks to get back into this unique flow of acrobatic combat.
But Respawn also use this downtime for some chatter between the giant robot and our hero. BT is sad because he lost his former pilot and Jack tries to comfort him with a few jokes that a robotic intelligence doesn't really comprehend. He asks BT how long he worked together with his former colleague, and when BT says 973 days, Jack responds: "Well that's longer than any relationship I ever had." Zing. This radio chatter is a lesson learned from other games.
"If you take a look at the narrative experiences of the last 10 or 15 years, all these games like Half-Life, BioShock and Uncharted keep you engaged with their characters on a constant basis," says Alavi.
An action puzzle experience like Half-Life 2
The gameplay is split into two parts: in-mech and on-foot combat. If you fight aboard BT, it pretty much feels like Call of Duty. Just that the enemies are not humans but 5-metre-high mechs lurking around corners, opening fire with Gatlings, grenade launchers and rockets.
It's intense but deeply tactical, because every gadget has a counter. If we use smoke so the enemy has a tougher time targeting, they respond with an EMP grenade electrifying the smoke so that we have to get out and start to fight again. It's fairly linear too, so at any time we can decide to leave the Titan, let the AI take over and fight on foot.
"We want this to be very dynamic, with a great sense of flow", explains Alavi. "You can take out some IMC soldiers that are just getting ready to hit your Titan with a rocket launcher. Make a jump from the bridge, BT opens his cockpit for you, you land and take over control again."
And that’s fun, for sure, but we came away more impressed with the flow of the puzzle-like level that followed. We get our hands on a tool called Arc Beacon that looks a bit like the gravity gun from Half-Life. Just a bit. When we get chased down by robots and infantry of the IMC, we can hack into panels over doors to open them and lower bridges. These kind of puzzles prove surprisingly tense and fast.
"We got inspired by BioShock and Half-Life, for sure. So we don't want you to stop to activate something, but rather maintaining a certain level of speed,” reveals Alavi. It's a great idea: left alone in these parkour areas without our Titan, we’re very vulnerable to rocket fire. So we dodge and sprint, wall-run, activate a door and slide to safety. Hopefully, the other levels of the campaign are as fun as the first one.
Now, let's talk multiplayer.
Multiplayer: Free DLC, fresh Titans
"We don't want to split the community. We want you to be happy with your purchase. So we are giving away all the maps and modes,” studio founder and CEO Vince Zampella revealed back at E3 in the summer.
But naturally, DLC production costs money, so it seems likely there will be in-game purchases like in Overwatch, even though this is still to be confirmed.
But how much fun is Titanfall 2 in multiplayer? We've played three different modes in Titanfall 2 so far: Bounty Hunt, Pilot vs Pilot and Hardpoint.
There are the new Titans too, including Scorch, a fire type Titan with a grenade launcher. Scorch's special abilities include launching a directional line of fire at an enemy, and an explosive smoke grenade. The other new Titan, Ion, uses a pulse rifle and is an energy based Titan whose charged ability includes a laser chest cannon and laser trip mines. Finally, there’s Ronin, a bad-ass samurai mech that slices its enemies with a giant sword.
The two maps that we demoed were Homestead, an open arena with wide fields and perfect for open range combat, and Boomtown, a more enclosed space with plenty of roofs to jump across.
The first mode was Bounty Hunt which is a team-versus-team mode in which players kill AI enemies and enemy players to earn money. After each round players deposit their earnings from killing into a shared bank and the team with the highest amount of money at the end of the match wins. Players will earn different values of money for killing AI, enemy players, special enemies, and Titans.
The next match was Pilot vs Pilot, which is a straightforward PvP mode that allowed players to battle each other three on three, rack up kills and summon Titans after earning enough points to call in a 'Titanfall'.
The final mode is Hardpoint, a capture-the-flag type mode in which players rush towards points A, B, or C to capture the point before the enemy team – a standard King-of-the-Hill type mode made all the better by the presence of giant robots. Players can choose between four classes: Front Rifleman, an assault class with ziplines; Closer, a faster assault class than Front Rifleman; Ghost Marksman, the sniper; and Operator, a tools expert. Players can also choose a custom loadout to fit their individual needs.
While Respawn Entertainment aren't ready just yet to talk about a possible edition for the upcoming PS4 Neo or Xbox Project Scorpio, the Californian studios have always worked close to the bleeding edge of technology.
The first Titanfall used Microsoft’s Azure Cloud to calculate the AI behaviour of our Titan when you asked him to go into bodyguard mode. For Titanfall 2 the centrepiece is a feature dubbed 'Networks'. Networks is a social tool for Titanfall players that allows them to form groups of friends, coworkers, or any other social family.
Since Respawn Entertainment expect more players to be playing Titanfall 2 at any given time, Networks is a useful tool to find friends and acquaintances at any given time. If popular, Networks will mean that a player will always have someone to play with, whether it's a personal Network, or a community Network created by websites or workplaces.
The combination of this new social aspect of Titanfall 2, combined with the fast-paced fluid action, the puzzle-like level design and the constant interaction with our very own Titan BT in singleplayer make Titanfall 2 a most wanted for Autumn 2016.
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