I haven’t followed this game and I don’t know any details, but I’m passingly familiar with how it looks and I know its basic premise. I’m curious to see how well it has been executed, and how well it is received by the public. I wouldn’t comment on the game’s quality without first trying it out for myself, and I don’t even know if I’ll ever play this thing, but I hope it proves successful for a number of design reasons. It does a number of things that I hope we can see a little more of in first-person shooters, and in video games as a whole.
I’ve never actually played any of the Call of Duty games before so I can’t comment on any of the things that old-school FPS fans tend to criticize it for, and I don’t know if Titanfall will have any of those things or not, or whether it will have any brand-new problems of its own, for that matter… but for anyone who likes the FPS genre but has ever felt disinterested by how homogenous the genre can be, I feel like the raw, fundamental concept behind this game was put together especially for players like you.
Even if this game ends up playing like cold wet socks, I’m happy to see that a game like it got the triple-A greenlight. I make no silly claims that that it’s the reinvention of the FPS, but just at a cursory glance I get the distinct impression that it’s a lot more unique than people seem to be giving it credit for.
I like that the game’s art direction vouches for how there is still a place for stylized visual aesthetics even within the realm of “realistic” high-fidelity graphics. It’s relatively subtle but it’s definitely there.
The game’s main hook, the being-on-foot-versus-being-in-a-mech dynamic, is conceptually a pretty neat idea to me. In a sense, giving players two distinct forms means that a random 1-on-1 encounter goes from having only 1 possible matchup (in a “normal” FPS) to having 4 different matchup scenarios that the player will experience: as runner vs runner, as runner vs mech, as mech vs runner, and as mech vs mech. I’m deliberately ignoring weapon variety, teammates, and map objectives here for clarity of explanation: the point still stands even when you add all of these things back in. In fact, those aspects of the game should theoretically only further multiply the already-increased baseline variety! So this one thing has the potential to bring a lot of texture to the gameplay.
I like that a little nimble guy going up against a great big mech is highly asymmetrical. Whether this turns out to be a hollow gimmick or an additive element of decision-making will probably largely depend on how the two forms are balanced against one another… which includes how getting mechs is limited. (In particular, the rules in place for obtaining a mech are likely what will (or will not) set the mechs apart from the vehicles in any other FPS’s.) I presume that mechs will have a small-to-moderate overall edge on runners in order to achieve the mood that I assume the devs were shooting for. “Shooting for.” Hurhurh.
More than anything else, though, I am a huge fan of seeing any multiplayer FPS give its players very kinetic and/or tactically interesting movement options (and fitting environments to use them in). I’m exercising my willpower and what few good manners I have to restrain myself back from flooding this thread with all of my thoughts and theories concerning the genre, but I will say that I strongly believe that a multiplayer FPS’s movement system is secretly at the mechanical core of what makes or breaks its gameplay with competitive players over the long run.
Titanfall seems to feature some pretty cool-looking ways to travel not only horizontally but vertically as well. As they should be, it looks like the maps and even the flagship matchup (how the tiny zippy runner needs to get up on top of the tall, less-maneuverable mech to destroy it) have literally been shaped around that ability to traverse vertical space along with the horizontal. The runners look like they’re probably a lot of fun just to move around, and the mechs actually do too.
Ooh, pop-up message on Twitch right now:
Has Twitch done this for any other game before?
