Titanfall: It’s Not New

I found myself talking to a friend of mine earlier today, a journalist coming up in the industry, about Respawn Entertainment’s upcoming sci-fi first-person shooter Titanfall. We spent a good hour discussing the game and how the media is praising it for being so unique and the “future of shooters.” We couldn’t help but laugh.

The rant begins.

Sure, Titanfall looks good. Let me get that statement out of the way. This article is not about how good Titanfall looks. No, instead it’s about how good it doesn’t look, and how people are praising it for being such an inventive and thrilling take on the shooter genre. It really isn’t people. It’s quite basic, in fact.

Nothing I have seen shows me a good game at all. Everything Respawn has told us, which isn’t much, points to the same old aspects that we’ve all grown so tired of in Call of Duty. All right, so there are mechs known as Titans in the game. Who cares? If we want a true mech-combat game, Hawken just released on Steam Early Access. It isn’t a groundbreaking feature to have giant mechanical walking behemoths in your game, nor does it make you innovative.

We’ll start with the AI/bots, which have become a huge controversy on their own.

6v6 is fine with me; there doesn’t need to be a massive amount of players for the game to be good. In fact, lately I’ve found myself gravitating towards the smaller game modes in games like Battlefield 4; they’re just easy to manage.

But filling the entire game with AI-controlled bots is not good. Not only is it just pure cannon fodder, all too easy to kill, it lacks substance and difficulty. It won’t be too difficult to find other players, however; I have a feeling they will all end up in Titans anyway, foregoing the use of their feet.

I’ve seen gameplay where the majority of players were all in Titans–I was under the impression they were rare and could only be called upon in certain circumstances. Nope. There were 4 on one team and another 2 or 3 on the other team. Again, I refer to Hawken, why not just make a mech game and get it over with, Respawn?

The lack of marketing on the game has also made me a little suspicious. Respawn claims to not want to give away too much information on their shooter, instead allowing the player to discover it through gameplay. And yet the Press is eating the game up and praising it as “A brave new vision of the future of multiplayer games.” Why? A beta with a couple of weapons and a map or two… we’ve seen it all before.

It… isn’t… new.

A lack of a single player campaign also has me riled up. I’m spending $60 on a game; I would like a little more than a rehashed multiplayer with a few maps and a couple of classes. “Single-player moments” are all well and good, but single-player they are not. It’s a multiplayer-only game, one that would fare far better as a downloadable title on the Xbox marketplace. That’s basically what we’re getting for a full price.

Lastly, the $250 Collector’s Edition.

I can’t argue that there isn’t a market for this, I buy Collector’s Editions simply for the extra goods in them. But $250? For a game no one has ever played before? The “true fan” of Titanfall will definitely want this, won’t they, Respawn? Unfortunately, those true fans don’t quite exist yet. Something like this would have been better off saved for the second entry in the planned franchise.

I intend to play Titanfall, probably at launch. It is my job to do so and I will keep a level head while playing it. The critical portion of my brain will come into play and my own opinions will be launched out. This is just a little rant over a game that doesn’t deserve this much hype or praise, at least not yet.

Rant concluded.