Titanfall

Titanfall is an excellent example of the problem of restricting all modes of a game to online matches. After all, despite injecting to its worn-out genre new mechanics that finally renew and expand the possibilities of an FPS, Titanfall fails to fully develop them, limiting the player experience.

The game’s story, which is told in an online campaign mode, is considerably simple. With the expansion of mankind throughout space, two factions go to war, fighting to control some planets. The factions are the Militia and the IMC (Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation).

The narrative, however, doesn’t make much effort to explain in detail the reasons for the war, treating it as if it was an inevitable event of space colonization. The two groups are facing each other because killing each other is what humanity would keep doing if we ventured into space. The battles also seem to be treated by the commanders of each faction as if they were trivial matches in a game, and they even reflect on their previous performances during the confrontations.

The potential that the Titanfall story had to criticize the trivialization of war in games of the genre – a path taken by Spec Ops: The Line, for example – is palpable, but, unfortunately, the game, written by Jesse Stern, prefers to adopt a complacent posture: instead of provoking questions about the nature of its events and characters, the game ignores the themes it presents and chooses to tell its story through terrible dialogue, rife with one-liners. In the end, Titanfall ends up becoming just what it could have addressed: an inconsequential story that treats war as a joke.

However, if regarding its themes the game adheres to the worst conventions of its kind; when it comes to the gameplay, it offers excellent additions to the genre that solve several of the problems that usually afflict similar titles.

The most remarkable and important change concerns the increase in movement of the playable character. Called “Pilot”, they are equipped to run on walls and to make huge double jumps without taking damage in the fall – which allows the player to move quickly and cover a large extension of the battlefield in a short time.

The repercussions of this mechanic are fundamental to the success of Titanfall. First, it generates a more elaborate level design by allowing us to reach the top of many buildings and structures with ease and so take full advantage of the verticality of the stages. This also opens up many possibilities for using precision rifles, snipers, creating ambushes, or even helping desperate escapes. Moreover, with verticality comes the vertigo of falling from very high places and the excitement resulting from intense jumps.

It’s also worth remembering that a big issue regarding level design when it comes to online multiplayer matches is the balance regarding where the player will respawn after losing. On the one hand, we can’t take long to get to the action every time our character dies – otherwise, we’ll get bored – but, on the other hand, we can’t respawn too close to the action, lest we die again without having time to rethink our strategy. The second advantage of the expanded movement is precisely the answer to this dilemma, making us respawn at a safe distance from the action, but able to reach it quickly.

Another great accomplishment of Respawn Entertainment is the inclusion of dozens of bots (AI-controlled enemies)  with very low firepower. With lots of them in the stages, the player will always have someone to shoot regardless of where they are and, more importantly, as the bots still generate experience when eliminated and influence the score of certain matches, they even make a novice player feel, at the end of a match, that their actions were relevant. The bots are also responsible for the large scale of the battles, with the huge number of soldiers shooting from all sides making each stage really look like a war zone.

The third game-changing element of Titanfall is the presence of titans: giant mechas that fall from the sky to be piloted by the player. After starting a match, we have to wait two minutes to call our titan – there are three types available: a resistant and slow one, a fragile and fast one, and a balanced one – and we can, as soon as it appears, choose to keep it guarding a certain place, ask it to follow us or pilot it.

The gameplay within a Titan is not so different from controlling a normal pilot regarding the forms of attacking an enemy – there is still a primary weapon, a secondary one, and a special power – but its movement is completely different, interfering with the entire dynamic of the battles.

A Titan cannot jump, which prevents it from crossing parts of the map, making it difficult to quickly leave an unequal confrontation, which encourages the player to use a special movement, called dash – which is limited to two uses for a certain period of time – to dodge some blows. The limitation is essential for pilots who wish to shoot it down, as they can use tall buildings to hit it without fear of rapid retaliation. On the other hand, its firepower is immense, managing to blow up pilots without any effort and even crush them by walking over them – something that will happen recurrently with the poor bots, empowering the player.

The titans present their own life bar that doesn’t regenerate itself – unlike what happens with the pilots, the usual Wolverines of the genre – but is protected by a fragile additional shield that recovers over time. This shield becomes an inconvenient factor for enemy pilots, whose heavy anti-titian weapons also take time to load after a few shots, giving the opponent room to recover. The solution is to attack in a group or mount the enemy titan – a move the game calls “Rodeo” – so you can aim at its weak point and directly hit its life bar. The player commanding the Titan, on the other hand, may abandon it for a few seconds to deal with the situation on foot or trigger a special skill that casts a cloud of toxic smoke that kills any nearby pilots.

It’s easy to see that Titanfall’s combat system is completely based on counter-attacks. For every move a player can make, there will always be an option to respond in kind. Since there are special skills and techniques available to everyone – Titans and pilots – Titanfall encourages strategy and teamwork to achieve victory.

Respawn Entertainment also introduces a unique reward system based on our performance in a match. In other games, the more enemies a player is able to eliminate in sequence without dying, the stronger the special item they receive will be, which makes them even more lethal, but, at the same time, unbalances the confrontation. In Titanfall, these typical rewards are discarded in favor of a less impactful, but more functional system: each enemy eliminated only shortens the waiting time for the next titan. Therefore, this system still rewards the experienced player, but in a way that the others are still able to defend themselves.

The only negative point in relation to the titans is the number of rechargeable elements when you are controlling it. The secondary weapon, the special ability, the dash, and the energy shield all recharge with time, which means there are many different bars being filled simultaneously that we have to pay attention to. The confusion resulting from this design is an anomaly in Titanfall, as the developers strived to remove any frustration from the game and to make it a very accessible FPS for all possible players.

Some of the ideas implemented in this regard, however, end up interfering negatively with the gameplay. One of the primary weapons, for example, called the Smart Pistol, even locks on automatically to enemies, requiring us to only to the trigger – eliminating, therefore, virtually all of the challenge of shooting. Other ideas prove to be harmless, such as the huge number of banal Achievements – “play with the Smart Pistol for an hour”, “walk for a kilometer” – which generates a lot of experience points and makes the playable character level up even if they only walked during the whole match.

But there are also some great ideas that add to the battles, such as the so-called “Epilogue”. Once the match is won by one of the teams, those who lost have a few seconds to escape in a rescue ship and still get a bonus amount of experience points. In this final part of the match, the dynamic of the clash changes completely. All players of one team start running desperately to a specific point on the map, while the others try to intercept them. In other words, the game allows some players, even if they lose the match, to have some consolation if they escape on the ship.

The game, however, falters when it comes to unlockables. There are very few different weapons in the game, which means that, most of the time, we will only be getting more customizable character models. As a result, the excitement of leveling up doesn’t take long to fade. Titanfall’s main problem, however, is that it presents many excellent mechanics and balanced systems, but lacks game modes to put them to good use.

Titanfall doesn’t feature a single-player mode, limiting our experience to online matches – which is bound to make it obsolete when its inevitable sequel arrives. It limits the experience to an online campaign mode, where the story is told during battles: in the middle of the action, in the top right corner of the screen, there will be the image of certain characters shouting their orders and slightly contextualizing the action.

These characters don’t have much personality and we will be hard-pressed to care about any of them during the entire campaign – a problem that becomes evident the moment one of them sacrifices themselves for the cause at the end of a stage and the players of the opposing team will probably have trouble remembering who that character even was.

The campaign is structured into several stages that only alternate between two game modes, one for capturing points and one called “Battle of Attrition”. The first is composed of maps with three specific points – A, B, and C – which are captured with the presence of a player nearby. It’s a classic game mode that requires a lot of teamwork: while some players guard one captured point, the rest must go on to the next. And “Battle of Attrition” is just a glorified name for the generalized killing that occurs in a Team Deathmatch.

That is, instead of the campaign presenting stages of its own, developing the mechanics of the game beyond the limitations of normal multiplayer matches, it simply borrows them and puts a random character shouting things to the player on the radio. It’s true that even this structure has potential, since we are dealing with multiplayer matches and one of the teams must lose.  In other words, the story could have gone in a different direction after each stage, depending on which team was the winner, the Militia or the IMC. However, Respawn Entertainment makes the end of the missions the same regardless of the outcome of the match. In one of them, for example, the IMC’s goal is to capture an enemy agent, but even if its team wins… the agent escapes. This makes us question the need for our presence in the battles, since even if our entire team refuses to fight and decides to stand still and enjoy the view, the story will continue as intended anyway.

Players will, nevertheless, find themselves having to finish both the IMC and Militia campaigns – which are obviously made of the same stages; only the individual screaming on the radio changes – if they want to unlock all the titans. A goal that will probably be much more exhausting than it should be, thanks to the limitations of an online match: as other players are needed for a match to be started, all it takes is for them to disconnect for the player to begin to have problems. If we manage to get to the last stage of the campaign, for example, and the other people leave the waiting room, the system will not wait for new players for too long, quickly expanding its search to previous stages and sending us back there – it could even be the first stage – and forcing us to do everything again from there. Since, in the PC version, the Origin’s server in Brazil is apparently limited to Latin America, it restricts even more the number of players and makes such a situation occur frequently, annoying even the most patient person.

And when this person finally completes the campaign, they will also be disappointed to find out that there are not many other game modes. “Hardpoint Domination”, where you capture points in the stage, and the “Battle of Attrition” remain the main game modes in the normal multiplayer, only differing from the campaign by the absence of random characters screaming on the top-right side of the screen. Besides them, there is only “Capture the Flag”  and two uninspired modes, “Pilot Hunt” and “Last Titan”, which only offer slight variations on the rules. The first is the usual Team Deathmatch, with the only difference being that only the death of enemy pilots counts towards the score, while “Last Titan”, as the name suggests, consists only of battles between titans – something that can eventually occur in normal matches – in which death is final.

With no offline or single-player modes, and even a robust and functional multiplayer to call its own, Titanfall fails to take advantage of its excellent mechanics. Titanfall, then, is destined to be overshadowed by any other game that takes its central ideas and dares to do something more with them.

February 04, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 21, 2016.