So what does Titanfall 2 have to do to keep us interested for more than a handful of pleasant hours? The key is learning not only from the first game, but also from the competition.  

One important step for building a successful sequel will be a long, hard assessment of the first game’s content. Titanfall has no traditional single-player elements, and the narrative – or what there is of it – is delivered haphazardly through in-game dialogue, often drowned out by the concussive sounds of small arms fire and giant robots blowing up. The focus is clearly on multiplayer, and sure, that’s great fun, with the mechs and parkour adding interesting wrinkles to the online shooter formula. But a few hours in, the novelty fades, the core of the game becomes very familiar. It feels doubly-so now, after Black Ops 3 (opens in new tab) has reappropriated some of TitanFall’s coolest tricks for its own online offering.

And unfortunately, even the creators of Call of Duty (who left Infinity Ward to create TitanFall developer Respawn) will struggle to compete with Call of Duty. The online shooter space is hugely crowded at the moment, and to carve out a meaningful part of it for any lengthy period of time requires something hugely significant, maybe even revolutionary. Even fragmenting the playerbase of COD or Destiny (opens in new tab) is a mighty challenge. Just look at what happened to the game that dared to be different: Evolve (opens in new tab).

Evolve attempted to take a solid shooter core and build a gimmicky shell around it. It was a great premise, on paper: one player plays as a giant, rampaging monster while the others assemble a team of human hunters to try to take the beast down. The buzz that early marketing generated for Evolve was understandable: it’s an idea with some flash. Sadly, the finished product is a one trick pony, and the trick isn’t even that great. The shooting is competent and fun, but playing as the monster feels lonely and frustrating, and after a couple of hunts the experience for both sides feels worn out. Evolve lacks the two things that create a sustainable arc for a game: diverse (or addictive) gameplay, and the lure of meaningful progression. 

 Which is where Destiny comes in. Bungie’s story as a developer follows a similar course to West and Zampella’s (the aforementioned minds behind Call of Duty and founders of Respawn). Creators of a massive, runaway success (Halo), Bungie eventually secured its freedom and signed a deal with a new publisher to pursue a new, ambitious project (Destiny). But while Titanfall’s lifespan didn’t extend much out of its release window, Destiny has sustained a sturdy base of very active players for over a year and a half now. So how did Bungie pull it off?

Destiny’s playerbase survived a relative dearth of content at launch because grinding the game feels so damn good. It may have been limited to four planets, but there was always something new to do or discover; endless subtle load-out variations to mess with. Multiplayer has always been a separate thing too, and that’s vital – players can choose to dip into both, or stick with one or the other. Destiny is as social as you want to make it, and as such it suits a wide variety of player tastes. This is something TitanFall 2 simply must embrace to avoid getting stuck in a niche.

The other lesson it can learn from Destiny is one of stuff. Early on, Destiny launched some decent-sized expansions, and kept players involved by offering up condensed bits of its best features, on top of a rotating schedule of Strikes and Missions with increasingly varied and attractive loot. Daily and Weekly activities keep the game in players’ lives – there’s always something worth checking in to see. And loot. Loot is a big carrot – something meaningful for players to keep striving for long after they’ve cleared the campaign and hit the level cap. Big expansions that add this type of content mean players who’ve stuck around have a reason to keep playing, and players that have dropped off have a reason to come back. Can TitanFall 2 realistically offer a compelling loot system? Maybe – it certainly needs to do more than reskin the original game.

Titanfall has a wonderful, gooey center which a far meatier game can be built around. Imagine a robust single player campaign, set in varied environments across different worlds, that builds a narrative around the military role of these huge mechs and their agile, almost superhero pilots. Sounds like a top shelf anime, or the plot of Pacific Rim 2.  

Give us sections of intense, kinetic parkour spliced with the big explosive set pieces we know Respawn can deliver. Give us crazy giant mech sequences that show off how cool the Titans are, how huge and powerful they can be, how they fit into interstellar police actions/invasions/defense. Most importantly, give the Titans personality, meaningful differences that feel more interesting than just choosing a class/loadout, and then give us hot robot loot to extend their capabilities, customize them, give players a sense of ownership of and connection to THEIR Titan. Make the progression feel meaningful and important, and give players choices more meaningful than a new scope or larger magazine.  

There are other possibilities, too. The Division (opens in new tab) showed us that building real tension into multiplayer scenarios, extracting loot on a timer while under fire from AI and other players, can add weight and levels of intensity simple deathmatch never reaches. Setting your multiplayer in an open environment creates gameplay opportunities that a standard map never could, and adding real consequences to the outcome of an online skirmish adds a unique sense of gravitas to the proceedings.  

The original Titanfall is a sturdy frame with some great nested ideas, begging for a bigger, better sequel to refine and perfect them. With enough time, resources, and loving attention, the bones are there for Titanfall 2 to be an unqualified hit, a game that survives the first few weeks after release and keeps players hungry for years afterwards.  

The post To succeed Titanfall 2 needs to learn from Destiny, COD, and er, Evolve appeared first on Game News.

Neither scene has any of the assassin-shooting, grunt-stomping protagonist violence you’ll come expect from the rest of each respective piece, yet this is about as thrilling as either gets, proper heart-in-mouth, heart-out-of-mouth, oh-god-I’ve-barfed-my-heart-out-in-excitement action. It speaks to a peculiar part of our brains – escapism’s a word you hear a lot when it comes to games, but recently we’ve started to think that they’re rarely as good as when they’re taking that word completely literally.

Look at Alien: Isolation (opens in new tab). That effervescent emotional mixture of not knowing where the Xenomorph might be, having the tools to find out but just not wanting to know – followed by desperate hiding sequences, mad dashes for a new, safer space or acid-flecked death – is a powerful thing. Far more powerful, it seems, than turning round with a gun and instantly reducing the thing to extra-terrestrial casserole meat.

We’ve seen this before, of course. Mirror’s Edge let players move around its world in ways they never had before, making escape from its guards both more viable and more fun than attacking them, and it looks set to do so again in the sequel (opens in new tab). It’s no surprise that forced combat sections came away feeling like misguided bobbins – they were contradictions, you couldn’t help but feel they’d been jammed in there by some gonk in a suit terrified of releasing a first-person game that shunned murder for that core, that literal escapist attitude.

That’s an attitude I think we will – or perhaps should – begin to see proliferate on Xbox One. Where escape sequences have traditionally been among games’ dullest moments, requiring little more than QTE prompts or an analogue stick jammed upwards, the opportunities offered by bolstered tech could see these moments become more dynamic.

Titanfall’s gentle parkour was the first logical step – make traversal freeing and fun, and people will want to use it as much for pleasure as for the tactical upper hand. Alien takes it to its next extreme – don’t just make flight fun, make it essential. Xbox One’s hefty gubbins allow for so much more play with the dynamics of light, sound, memory space and artificial intelligence than devs have had access to before. You’re not playing with a rolling boulder stand-in in a corridor anymore, you’re acting out dynamic cat and mouse chases that require clever, intricate movement, non-violent tools and an adrenaline gland equipped to deal with multiple bursts of high-power heebie-jeebies.

(opens in new tab)

(opens in new tab)

In a way, it offers the option for more power to the player, despite their vulnerability. In a shooter, you rely on your guns, your ammo, and whatever perks you might have equipped. In a well-created ‘run-away-‘em-up’, your own ability to discern where a noise came from, how a light moved or where you need to be next are tools you bring yourself. The opportunities are there, the consequences could be thrilling – we just need to, ironically, stop running away from them.

Click here (opens in new tab) for more excellent Official Xbox Magazine articles. Or maybe you want to take advantage of some great offers on magazine subscriptions? You can find them here (opens in new tab).

The post Why would you want to shoot things when its more fun to run away from them? appeared first on Game News.

Now, let me be perfectly clear: Xbox One’s version of Titanfall is excellent. Sure, its frame-rate is a bit flaky and it doesn’t run at 1080p, but the game is fundamentally extremely fun and everyone likes it very much. The GamesRadar UK team even plays it at lunchtimes. Sign of a good game, that. When we play it because we want to, it must be good.

But that’s why I suspect it’s going to turn out fine on Xbox 360 too. The concept behind Titanfall is strong regardless of next-gen power. And after all, Bluepoint Games’ 360 version reportedly has all the 6v6 multiplayer, Titans, Burn Cards, rockets, shields and everything else the ‘big’ version has. The only real difference is that it runs at 30fps and upwards, as opposed to Xbox One which runs at 60fps (and downwards).

That 30fps could have an adverse impact on how well the game plays, due to every press of a button taking twice as long to be reflected on-screen. OK, I’ve simplified that a little. There are other factors too that make it not quite that cut-and-dried (like frame buffers and upscaling and what-have-you), but that’s the basic idea.

Case in point: Call of Duty would be worse if it ran at 30fps because it demands quick reflexes to react to an enemy threat in the blink of an eye. But with Titanfall, I doubt it will affect the game as much. The Titans’ movements are slow enough that they don’t demand laser-fast reactions necessarily. A commanding use of cover, spacial awareness and mastery of the dash control are of much more use to a Titan pilot than a twitchy trigger finger. And as for the on-foot combat… well, it won’t be as slick as Call of Duty, but it will be the same for everyone.

The simple fact remains that this 360 version (apparently) is Titanfall. And it’s been conveniently overlooked by Microsoft’s advertising department because they’d probably rather it didn’t exist. They want to secure as many sales of Xbox One Titanfall bundles as possible, not champion the fact you can also buy the same game on a machine you already own.

There’s nothing wrong with that strategy. But maybe there is something wrong with a last-gen version existing at all. Personally I don’t think we should be seeing last-gen versions of new-gen games at all any more. Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed… I just want the new-gen games to be as revolutionary as they should be. If there’s any suggestion that multi-generational development is holding back a game, it’s a bad thing for the industry. And if a next-gen showcase can be run perfectly well on the previous generation hardware, there’s something wrong somewhere.

If Titanfall turns out to be every bit as enjoyable on 360 (or, god forbid, better), then let’s be honest: why should people upgrade to next-gen? It’s Xbox One’s biggest game. Ideally, you shouldn’t even be able to buy a PC version, let alone a 360 version. But I bet the 360 version will sell more, even if it has a higher RRP, which apparently is the case in some areas.

The 360 version has already had a two-week delay to ensure Bluepoint could “put the finishing touches on the game”. Well, it can’t be delayed forever. It’s out tomorrow in the US and Friday in the UK. It’s too late to cancel… we’re about to get Xbox 360 Titanfall. GamesRadar has not been sent a copy to play, which is unusual. Normally, that means a game isn’t very good. But in this instance, I bet it’s because it is.

The post How inconvenient: Titanfall on Xbox 360 looks perfectly fine appeared first on Game News.

Titanfall is a multiplayer-only experience. Respawn Entertainment co-founder Vince Zampella told GamesIndustry International that keeping the focus on multiplayer battles was a deliberate response to player habits and studio size.

Respawn comprises about 60 developers, and devoting months of their work to single-player missions most players blow through in minutes just doesn’t make sense, Zampella said.

“And how many people finish the single-player game? It’s a small percentage. It’s like, everyone plays through the first level, but 5 percent of people finish the game,” he said. “Really, you split the team. They’re two different games. They’re balanced differently, they’re scoped differently. But people spend hundreds of hours in the multiplayer experience versus as little time as possible rushing to the end [in single-player]. So why do all the resources go there? To us it made sense to put it here. Now everybody sees all those resources, and multiplayer is better. For us it made sense.”

The franchise that Zampella helped create at Infinity Ward looks ready to continue with both a cinematic, expensive campaign and expansive multiplayer in Call of Duty: Ghosts. Zampella doesn’t see his new game as a direct competitor.

“Honestly, we’re not shipping the same time as them,” Zampella said. “We’re going for something different. We’re not gunning for Call of Duty. We’re doing our thing. The important thing is to make sure what we’re doing is fun. I’m OK with Call of Duty being big. I helped create it, so I’m proud to see it’s something so big that it goes beyond me.”

Here’s that E3 debut video, in case you missed it.

The post Titanfall creator explains lack of single player appeared first on Game News.