Titanfall is a comfortably brown military FPS backed by Microsoft, but it’s still a risk for Respawn. Not because gamers are due to give up on fetishising guns this gen, but in a world where every multiplayer shooter has an arbitrary campaign for the express purpose of cutting trailers and adding perceived value, Titanfall has none.
“In our game, multiplayer is the campaign,” says lead designer Mackey McCandlish. “Every level has a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You play as a Pilot – they’re soldiers with extra manoeuvrability – but the battlefield is also populated with AI grunts to fill out the scene, and talk, and bring Titanfall that grounded reality that AI characters have been bringing to singleplayer for a long time.”
Titanfall is the latest product of the sci-fi revival. As McCandlish points out, Saving Private Ryan kickstarted the early 2000s’ WWII obsession and Black Hawk Down helped spawn the modern military shooter, but Titanfall will thrive off the back of Prometheus and District 9 with its galaxy-spanning tale of mech (the titular Titans) war.
As players join the servers, they populate massive dropships. After a brief recruitment phase, these warp over the battlefield and disgorge Pilots from above. “Our game is still infantry-based; we’re not building colossal maps for tanks, but we have to build for big infantry and small infantry, and then we have to build so that the small infantry have useful spaces to get an advantage over the Titans. Every map is small enough to be lovingly hand-crafted [and] to take advantage of this scale disparity you get between the cat and mouse, the Titans and Pilots.”
And Titanfall’s Pilots are agile mice: they can scale buildings in seconds and walljump to mount Titans, tearing away their armoured housing and opening fire on the internal components. In a straight fight, a Pilot on foot is no match for a Titan, but Titans will quickly learn to be wary of elevated vantage points from which Pilots can board and crush the mechs. Far better, then, to pilot your Titan with a friend riding shotgun. Players can hitch a ride on passing friendly mechs as they wait for their own suits to fall into battle, and provide covering fire.
Respawn’s E3 demo is a showcase of moments you wouldn’t see in a current shooter, but it’s the studio’s history that makes Titanfall such a draw for Xbox One. Made up of members from 2015 Inc and Infinity Ward, this is the same team that under two different names has defined two generations of console gaming. If its trendsetting nature continues, it will kill the bolt-on singleplayer campaign as it defines this one.
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