Titanfall and Titanfall 2

[Indiana747]

Ordered 360 version yesterday(no idea why its a tenner more expensive than the XBO version though). Got a free 3 month XBLive code from the nice people at World of Tanks(they just sent me a code by email out of the blue, i think they wanted me back playing their game though, but hey)so decided to see what all the fuss is about. Can always sell it on when the 3 months is up so its win/win, lol. If any of you guys are playing on Titanfall on 360, let me know & we can team up so you can so me the ropes.

[DomsBeard]

Yes I'm on 360 bigrich1979

[Electric Crocosaurus]

Feel free to add me Indiana747: I'm laj105

Haven't been on for a while so it'll be good to go back for a few games.

[DomsBeard]

I'll be on in a few minutes hopefully

[Yacobg42]

I almost never play multiplayer shooters, but I spent an inordinate amount of time with Titanfall; I think this can be attributed to a couple factors.

First, I picked it up launch day, which prevented my frequent experience with multiplayer games where I enter a lobby full of people who have already mastered the maps and mechanics and subsequently get myself absolutely wrecked.
Secondly though, and maybe more importantly, is that I think Titanfall does several things to make its multiplayer uniquely fun. The fact that there are tons of NPCs on the field let me feel like I was still contributing to my team, even if I couldn't handle killing other players. Similarly, the guaranteed titans mean that everyone gets to live out a power fantasy or two per match, no matter their skill.

As I got better and went through a number of prestiges (or regenerations, whatever), I came to appreciate just how versatile the various systems allowed you to be. I loved amping myself up as a superfast shotgunner, or a titan-jockey with invisibility and packs of c4. I also still remember cackling as I zapped 5 people at a time with the titan's lightning gun. The parkour mechanics just felt instantly 'right' to me, and playing an fps without them now feels like it still has training wheels on. Seeing a titan crash in out of the sky also never got old.

Origin lists me as having 102 hours played of Titanfall, but also tells me that the last time I played was August of 2014. I haven't been back. When I "fall of the wagon" of an FPS, so to speak, I always find the experience of returning and not being as talented as I once was to just be painful. I still have wonderful memories of Titanfall though; I haven't really found another FPS that scratches the same itch.

[mikeleddy83]

Is a community game still happening? I heard rumbles but it's gone quiet lately.

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

Podcast contribution - revised 18th May!

As a day one Xbox One owner, Titanfall was a big deal when it finally released 4 months after that troubled launch. The initial line-up of games for the console was decent for sure, but Titanfall felt like the big, exclusive marker-in-the-sand that Microsoft and Xbox players needed to help right the ship (yes it came to 360 and PC but you wouldn't have known from the marketing!). Finally everyone would be talking about a great game rather than all the political nonsense that had dominated every conversation about the console since its unveiling.

The marketing push felt huge, with the game treated like a first party triple-A release despite being an EA published title, and all signs pointed to something really quite special. Yes there was no traditional single player mode, but that was shoved to the back people’s minds (certainly mine anyway) as we all jumped aboard the hype train.

So, did Titanfall live up to these lofty expectations and adequately shoulder such a heavy burden?

Not really. There’s no denying that the core of the game is fantastic fun. Super-slick movement, intelligent multi-level stage design, and solid gunplay meant that the game played beautifully, but it didn’t take long before the feeling of ‘is this it?’ settled in. After putting in a good couple of weeks of play it all just got a bit repetitive for me, and that seemed to be a feeling shared by many on my friends list as the sight of people playing Titanfall became quite a rare one after the initial launch buzz had died.

Overall for me personally, I’d describe Titanfall as a really good game that was just sorely lacking in content at launch, and my fingers are firmly crossed that the forthcoming sequel addresses this considerable issue. I know there was loads of apparently great content released post launch, and that eventually it all went free which will make the game a much cheaper, weightier beast for those picking it up now, but speaking as a guy who paid full whack on release I can't help but feel short-changed by my own experiences with it.

[Flabyo]

I think it's a shame that many of the people who picked it up early didn't stick with it. They added to it constantly for over a year, rebalancing, adding new game modes and so on. It was probably the best example of a multiplayer title being supported strongly by its publisher until Nintendo launched Splatoon.

Running the game itself entirely on the cloud server with the player client being relatively thin is now seen as the 'expected' way to do competitive FPS games, something the PC has known for a while, but hasn't been common on the consoles until recently. That kind of infrastructure is expensive to set up (ask Blizzard), but the MS Azure service appears to be the enabler here. Cloud services is big business, and more and more games are going to run themselves this way (almost every big F2P game on mobile uses some variation of it, whether it's the Microsoft one, Google's or Amazon's.)

The game itself is a lot more intimate than the larger scale 'Battlefield' type games though, and people originally thought filling the levels with AI bots was an attempt to recreate that feel. But that's not really what they're there for.

One of the biggest problems any multiplayer shooter has is trying to strike the balance between being fun for new players as well as your existing audience. If the game gets too hardcore then new players simply don't stick around, who wants to play a game where you just get owned all the time? The bots are a clever way to provide new players with something to fight and kill that still helps the team, and also lets them learn the game.

They also manage to strike a good balance between playing on foot and in the Titan. Yes, the Titans can squish the people on foot, but the wall running gives on-foot players access to a verticality that most FPS games simply don't have. If you're on the ground when you're not in your Titan, you're not playing it right. Most of the expert level skill comes from learning how to traverse the maps quickly, how to dash between objectives in capture mode etc... Watch some video on YouTube of people demonstrating the sheer amount of movement the player has and it'll open your eyes to how different this game can be played to the norm. (I struggled early on with Halo 5 when that launched because I kept trying to wall run... it got that deeply ingrained into my muscle memory)

It has plenty of flaws. The plot is generic sub-Firefly nonsense about rebels and AI uprisings and suchlike. The voice acting is not great (one guy really wants you to think he's Idris Elba. He is not.) Nice music though.

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

They added to it constantly for over a year, rebalancing, adding new game modes and so on. It was probably the best example of a multiplayer title being supported strongly by its publisher until Nintendo launched Splatoon.

I've heard this from a few people and I'm sure you're right. It did seem to get plenty of post release support which is always nice to see, but much of it wasn't done out of the goodness of their hearts - they were still asking for money for new maps etc. Out of the box at the price they charged on release, there simply wasn't enough of a game there for me, and it left me fairly disinclined to hand over more cash if I'm honest.

I'm sure now as a total package that can be picked up for peanuts it's a great deal, but that' certainly wasn't the case for full price at launch.

[Flabyo]

The maps all went free after about 6 months.

Also, no-one does *anything* in game development out of the goodness of their hearts.

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

The maps all went free after about 6 months.

Which is very nice of them and all (and I heard the content was great!) but it doesn't solve my problem of it being a lot of money for not a lot of content for those of us that picked it up at launch. I know people could counter that with 'well that's what you get if you pay full price at launch these days' and they'd sadly be right in many cases (SF5 please stand up!), but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Also, no-one does *anything* in game development out of the goodness of their hearts.

Absolutely! Nor should they. Tis a business after all, and the good people (like yourself I believe sir!) that work their buttocks off keeping our beloved hobby alive deserve significant remuneration for their efforts (probably more than they actually get in many cases I expect!).

[Sinclair Gregstrum]

Have revised my contribution to the podcast following our chat Flabyo as I think covering off that point about the extra content you brought up is a really important one...

[The_Rooster]

Being a mainly battlefield player I was surprised how much I enjoyed Titanfall. I played battlefield 3 for ages but Titanfall really took me to the next level of the genre. The freedom the movement system gives you around the maps changed how you would normally play FPS's.Think other games have tried to copy the movement system although I haven't played them I've heard they couldn't implement it as well.

The Titans themselves are awesome. When your pined down in a building while waiting for a Titan to be ready, then once is calling it in landing on an enemy Titan is a great feeling. Plus I could never get bored of jumping in it.

Took me a while to get my head around the leveling system but I loved the way it made you play in different ways to keep leveling up. Get x amount of rifle kills then x amount of sniper kills was a great challenge.

As for the 'campaign' it was pointless to have a story but it didn't affect my feelings on the game. I for one don't mind certain games not having a story mode if ment the multiplayer isn't hindered by it by setting or the mechanics. (never completed a campaign on any cod or battlefield) but guess that's a conversation for a later stage.

Great game and now it's all available on EA Access it's a bargain for any fan of FPS genre. Bring on Titanfall 2 with Swords (Pacific Rim anyone).

TWR: Your Titan's Ready

[skidoosh]

I thought I'd better start this at it's not too far away now and:



Also there's a beta registration for anyone who might want to give it a go without committing at https://www.titanfall.com/en_us/tech-test/

[Indiana747]

Dont think registration is needed for Titanfall 2 Beta, just get it on the store, could be wrong.
Its BF1 that requires registration as a Battlefield insider to get a beta access code emailed.

[mikeleddy83]

I am absolutely all over this! I'm a huge fan of the first game.

I'm determined to have a blast over the next few weeks. Are you all on Xbox One or PS4 for this beta?

PSN: mikeleddy83, XBL: mikeleddy83


Edit: once again an essay about shelf-life of games, Titanfall 1 still being good, catch 22's, exclusivity bias, single player completion markers and community expectations flushed. I'm getting good at this editing stuff

[Jusifer]

Im going to be playing the beta pretty much the whole day tomorrow on xbone so if anyone's interested send me a message!

XBL: The Uppu

[Sean]

So how did we all feel about it? I literally wasn't able to ever finish a match. Game always timed out before the end. Otherwise, I wasn't really feeling it. Maps were way too open, and, I never even piloted a Titan. Like, how do you make Titans hard to get in a game called TITANFALL!?

[Flabyo]

It sounds like most of the feedback they got was 'why did you change it so the Titan's are so hard to get now?' so I expect that will change.

In the first game it ran on a timer, when the timer was up you got your titan. Good play would speed the timer up, but not by a massive amount. It meant everyone got their titans at about the same time, but the best players had about a 60 second head start.

In this one, it's based on kills. So good players get titans, less good players don't. At all.

That's a positive feedback loop, and those are almost always bad in game design so I'm surprised they did it.

(A positive feedback loop, the player(s) that are leading gain an advantage that makes it easier to stay in the lead. See Monopoly, the worst boardgame ever.)

[Combine Hunter]

They are addressing this. If you saw the post they made, the Titans will unlock via a timer now.