In the long long ago, in the days before free-to-play games,
in the era before multiplayer-only titles could be released for full retail
price, there was a game called Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare. Modern Warfare was, at first glance, a
well built, meticulously structured FPS title that did a lot of things right,
told a pretty okay story, and had clean, well-crafted gameplay with a robust
customization system running under the hood.
Upon closer examination, a highly optimized, extremely polished
multiplayer game revealed itself, coupled with an arcade-style replay mode for
the single player campaign that tapped into feedback responses both modern and
ancient.
The company that made Modern
Warfare then made Modern Warfare 2,
which kind of went a little bit overboard while trying to expand on what Modern Warfare did right, but was still
pretty okay. Then, amidst an ugly
internal power struggle between Activision-Vivendi and Infinity Ward, the vast
majority of Modern Warfare 2's
development team was fired. Bonuses were
rescinded for many developers who had been attached to the project since before
it had a name, Infinity Ward was rendered a shell of its former self, and key
members of the dev team for the first Modern
Warfare game started work under the name Respawn Entertainment. They set up shop under EA's umbrella and,
four years later, they released a new project called Titanfall that took every lesson learned during the first two Modern Warfare games and used the sum
total of those lessons to make one of the best fucking first person shooters
I've played since the first Modern
Warfare title.
Modern Warfare turned
on a wickedly well constructed feedback loop that nearly invariably convinced
players they were doing better than they actually were - I'd argue it
understood how to do this better than any game before (and, until the release
of Titanfall, I would've said since). The framework surrounding that feedback loop
involved things constantly happening: rewards for particularly skillful play,
or rewards for picking yourself out of a slump.
On the other side, its Arcade mode encouraged frenetic, score based
killing that took the FPS genre and made it into a kind of quasi-arcade game
about movement, momentum and timing, fraught with popping numbers and
up-ticking scores.
Titanfall joins
these two systems into a seemingly aberrant multiplayer-only proposition that,
shockingly enough, lives up to the hype surrounding its release and then
some. By joining the "arcade
shooting" single player game and fast paced iterative multiplayer game
together through the inclusion of bots, a nominal campaign structure, and a
series of time-released rewards, Respawn managed to make a game that actually
improved on Modern Warfare's
feedback-loop system while deftly avoiding the feature creep and balance
pitfalls that plagued Modern Warfare 2.
See, Modern Warfare 2
was, for the most part, a lot like the original Modern Warfare, with a few notable exceptions. Modern
Warfare 2 featured around a dozen killstreak items, to the first Modern Warfare's three. It also featured more perks, more guns, and
some substantial balance problems revolving around attempts to make FPSes a
little less FPSy - things like teleporting ninjas who never need to stop
sprinting or shotgun-wielding dickheads who can present a never-ending stream
of two-fisted buckshot with a longer effective range than most hip-fired
assault rifles. The game was, at its
core, well constructed, but it fell apart under its own weight, as those
elements that had been tacked on to make the game feel like it was "more
than" Modern Warfare started to
interfere, rather than elevate, the tight, tautly crafted play of Modern Warfare's systems.
This concern, often referred to as "feature
creep," relates to a point where a game acquires more elements then it
needs. Best case, these elements are simply
redundant, additional things that operate exactly the same way that other
things operate. Battlefield 4 is big on this kind of feature creep, where assault
rifles and carbines are constantly added to the game, and almost always
function in a way that only the most concerned players comprehend. The more common result of feature creep is a
problematic experience for new players, who are unable to develop skills or
understand game systems in an overcrowded framework, and are forced to endure a
"hell state" until feature roles begin to coalesce for them. DotA 2
is a superlative example of this kind of feature creep, where new players are
asked to memorize the interactions of over one hundred heroes with little or no
readily accessible documentation.
Feature creep can also negatively impact developers, who are unable to
effectively balance each feature in the game system while still preserving a
unique role for all of the varied elements making up the whole of the
game.
Modern Warfare 2
had all three of these problems. Titanfall has none of them.
It's not that there isn't a lot going on in Titanfall. There are plenty of toys, each distinct, each
fun, each very different. The options
for customizing characters and choosing a role to play are rich, and unfold in
a manner that allows new players to easily find their footing by keeping the
number of variables at play relatively low.
See, Titanfall keeps things
simple, but the combination presented by its systems, and the robustness of
each available style of play, keeps things from feeling anemic. Even though there's really only a handful of
guns available to players, with only ten pilot weapons and six titan weapons, each
weapon is very distinct and useful, so nothing feels superfluous. And the manner in which combinations of gear
pair with "Tactical Abilities" (which range from things like
"running real fast" to "making yourself invisible" as a
pilot, to "filling an area with deadly electrical chaff" or
"projecting an impassable bullet shield" as a Titan), ordinance (game
speak for grenades or mines for pilots, or secondary missiles for Titans) and
"kits" (equivalent to Call of
Duty's perks) keeps things fresh.
Sure, you might like playing with that auto-aiming Smart Pistol when
you've got the ability to run on walls faster and higher, but what if you pair
that Smart Pistol with the ability to move around without making noise? And what kind of Titan kit will you pair it
with? A menacing pilot-shredding Stryder
with a chaingun and cluster missiles? Or
a heavy hitting Ogre with a Quad Rocket and a Multi-Missile target system?
The parts are easy enough to understand, but playing with
how those parts fit together takes time.
I've spent nearly 20 hours playing so far, and I've still just barely
scratched the surface. I'm still
finishing up weapon unlocks, and I've only really used one of the Tactical Abilities - the promise of being invisible
has just been too sweet to pass up, at least for me. But Titanfall
doesn't care - it's not punishing me for not using a particular system, or if
it is, I haven't noticed yet. And as
time goes on, maybe I'll explore the game more.
The balance of the whole affair is superlative, and the manner in which
the game populates its world with bots as a sort of "bullet chaff" is
a brilliant way to keep the play from ever getting dull, clearly drawing from
the arcadey feel that made playing through the first Modern Warfare again and again so darn fun. There's something about mowing down a row of
slack-jawed bots and watching points stack up and knock seconds off my Titan's
deploy time that feels satisfying, like watching numbers pop up above my head
after I pick up a piece of fruit in Pac
Man.
Not to say that Titanfall
is flawless. Two of its gameplay modes
are thoroughly redundant, specifically the Attrition mode, where you get points
for killing anything, and the Pilot Hunter mode, where you earn points for
killing pilots. The end result of each
mode is indistinguishable: you play a Team Deathmatch like setup, and the
momentum of the game is almost always insurmountable. But that's nitpicking; it's only a significant
issue when you compare the way those modes play to the way the games other
modes, which orient themselves around different concerns like map control,
movement, or, in one case, terse, taciturn, respawn-free combat.
There are also items that are, straight up, just better than
most other items. While every gun has
its use, certain guns feel like "the best" out of the gate. For example, the 40 millimeter cannon, a
massive Titan weapon that fires huge semi-explosive rounds at considerable
velocity with no range decay and a healthy semi-automatic rate of fire,
outperforms every other Titan weapon in most situations. There are outliers, sure, but you'll never
regret choosing the 40 mil, which you can't really say for certain about other
Titan weapons, the usefulness of which is often of extremely conditional. Pilot weapons are a bit better rounded, but,
for my money, the CAR, an SMG/assault rifle hybrid, seems to be the most
effective weapon, especially when it gets kitted out with a combination of
doodads that allow you to fire while sprinting and hip-fire while running with
the same spread characteristics that you'd have while standing still. It has its problems, sure, but it makes the
game feel a bit cheap when you fight an entire team alone and come out on top
of them thanks to your tricked out CAR and your frenetic wall-leaping habits.
Of course, that same scenario is also super exhilarating,
and that exhilaration is at the heart of Titanfall. It's an extremely polished product, and those
balance issues have never made me feel like the game favors a particular sort
of meta - unlike Modern Warfare 2,
where players were punished for not dual wielding shotguns or using a tactical
pistol with a knife, Titanfall rests
on a robust system permitting a multitude of play styles to collide in an
interesting way. The end result is a fast-paced,
smart first person shooter with an immersive, engaging progress-system. There's no aspect of Titanfall that qualifies as boring, and no aspect of it that
doesn't, in some way, seem to derive from Repsawn Entertainment's storied pedigree. All in all, it's extremely well crafted fun
that has just the right amount of artifice behind it all, demonstrating its
ability to learn from previous systems during its development without ever
losing its own voice. The end result is
something incredible: the best multiplayer shooter that I've played since the
original Modern Warfare.
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