Titanfall: I don't get the hype

[Vendetta]

The trouble is, with videogames you have to make the storytelling part really good if you're going to have it at all, especially if it's going to do this weird combination of a proper campaign storyline and standard-issue online FPS gameplay.

Joke of the year!

People will buy any old shit as gold when it comes to videogame storytelling. They're so inured to the terribleness that is the norm that mere competence is mistaken for excellence. (see: Bioware's reputation, they're actually not very good at storytelling, they can, at most, write good companion characters but they keep reusing the same few archetypes anyway.)

[Oskuro]

In what world is Counter-strike even comparable to the modern shooter? Same with Quake. You might, in some form, compare Titanfall to the Unreal Tournament series, but it's a stretch and then some. But the game seems to cram enough concepts together to make it hard to compare to anything, which is a good thing. And Day of Defeat? Is that even worth mentioning?

They are comparable, specially because the modern games are built on the foundation set up by those previous games. The only difference is the scale that the modern budgets and technology afford the new titles.

Blindly defending that the new games cannot be compared to their predecessors is as bad as rabidly defending the old games. Both attitudes fail to understand how the medium flows and fluctuates with time, and how titles influence each other.

And that's the point I'm going for. Titanfall is not revolutionary, no title in the genre has really been revolutionary since the first 3d or pseudo-3d shooters showed up. But from the hype it almost seems like it is.

The core difference between Titanfall and a game like Battlefield is exactly that. In the core game modes you start off without your Titan, and the process of unlocking it via farming creeps/killing other pilots gives the matches a sense of escalation. There have been gamemodes that tried to bring escalation into FPS (Invasion mode in Halo Reach, Rush in Battlefield, etc) but they're always forced by staging the map.

Funny thing, Battlefield 1942 had escalation, in the form of base captures unlocking new vehicle spawns. The base game didn't take much advantage of that mechanic though, but with some creativity you could churn out very interesting maps. Which, again, supports my point that modern games are refining existing concepts (which is good, don't take me wrong) but are hardly innovating.


I like the MOBA-like angle, though, and really wonder why hasn't there been a first person hack-and-slash MOBA-like game made yet. You know, besides the fact that I'm still working on the engine to make my own

Thing is, Day of Defeat and Red Orchestra fans don't hand over untold millions of dollars for them every year. CoD and Battlefield fans do, so they are the ones getting what they paid for. Which is more, newer, and shinier CoD and Battlefield.

That is undeniable. What bothers me is the aftertaste of dishonesty I get from most hype-machine marketing strategies, almost as if they were trying to rewrite history in their favour. Seems Orwell forgot to add a Ministry of Gaming

[StarSword]

That is undeniable. What bothers me is the aftertaste of dishonesty I get from most hype-machine marketing strategies, almost as if they were trying to rewrite history in their favour. Seems Orwell forgot to add a Ministry of Gaming

That's nothing new. Every marketing campaign in history wants you to think their product is something nobody's ever done before.

Really, there aren't that many new mechanics to be had. The trick is which ones you use and in what combinations. What made the first Halo good from a gameplay standpoint wasn't regenerating shields/static health, dedicated grenade and melee buttons, seamless transitions between infantry and vehicle combat, and so on; all of those had been done before individually. What made Halo special was that this was one of the first times anybody had tried putting them all in the same game, and a console game at that.

[TheFeniX]

Joke of the year!

People will buy any old shit as gold when it comes to videogame storytelling. They're so inured to the terribleness that is the norm that mere competence is mistaken for excellence. (see: Bioware's reputation, they're actually not very good at storytelling, they can, at most, write good companion characters but they keep reusing the same few archetypes anyway.)

There's been this push in gaming over the last few years, although it's dragging out to a decade now to find the "Citizen Kane of Gaming" which is so unbelievably stupid, it's helping kill whatever innovation is left in gaming. And it's pushed by "journalists" and people who don't actually enjoy video games as where gaming needs to go.

Prey had the most racially insensitive and balls out retard storyline ever, and that game was pretty damned good. But that was aliens powering their ship off Native American blood, so whatever, right? But the current push for everything in the "modern" genre (or "not so distant future™") has developers scrambling over themselves to go way up over the top, but still try and keep things grounded in reality and/or the world as we know it. It's created a rather schitzo gaming experience.

Anyone remember the old Simpsons episode where the Russian UN ambassador clicks a button and "Russia" flips over to "USSR" and tanks start rolling out of every Russian monument? That's more believable than the current crop of writing we're getting these days. You don't have to leave the "modern" era to delve into fantasy and writers don't seem to know that. But they keep this escalation of story-telling going which is pushing things even over 80s action movie territory.

They are comparable, specially because the modern games are built on the foundation set up by those previous games. The only difference is the scale that the modern budgets and technology afford the new titles.

Counter-Strike is and always has been off in it's own little corner. The gameplay is almost completely unique from any other FPS out there. Though the original MW seems to have cribbed certain aspects to create an even more accessible FPS, they still aren't comparable.

Blindly defending that the new games cannot be compared to their predecessors is as bad as rabidly defending the old games. Both attitudes fail to understand how the medium flows and fluctuates with time, and how titles influence each other.

Constantly comparing games is another issue with the industry. Not only do games with very little in common keep getting compared to other "standards" in the industry, reviewers freak the fuck out when they have a hard time with comparisons because it forces them to actually think and come up with an opinion rather than "It's isn't <insert big-name comparison> but it delivers a solid experience and the publisher just bought $50k worth the add space: 9/10."

Saint's Row 3 and 4 finally just went off the deep end to stave off the "poor-man's GTA" label and GTA hasn't been worth a shit since pre-GTA4. But the market had no room for two distinct GTA games, or so publishers would believe.

The current crop of competing shooters look and play the exact same with notable exceptions. You're going to be looking down the sights, sprinting long distances, and running through bombed-out shit-holes that are decidedly flat. Also, unlocks and some sort of progression because every game needs that now for some reason. Part of this is due to the arena shooter completely dieing off and Halo being run into the ground by morons.

Go back to 99 and compare 3 competing shooters: Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Counter-Strike. Completely unique looks and playstyles. Damn, even mid-2000 had a decidedly open-range of FPS, especially on PC. PC is really the only area we're getting something resembling innovation these days and that's going to be strangled by multi-plats for the next 7 years because the new consoles aren't on par with last-years PC.

And that's the point I'm going for. Titanfall is not revolutionary, no title in the genre has really been revolutionary since the first 3d or pseudo-3d shooters showed up. But from the hype it almost seems like it is.

People were touting Gears of War as revolutionary even though I remember CliffyB himself saying all they did was cobble together a bunch of ideas from other games and implemented them in a new way. Gears of War also managed to implement them all almost flawlessly unlike previous games. Neither the atrocious Perfect Dark 360 nor the Rainbow 6 games could even implement a decent cover system at the time.

"Revolutionary" is basically a buzzword these days. No one but reviewers and game developers even use the damn word. It exists to be stuck on those atrociously designed "GOTY" box arts. The last time I really even recall it being used in a serious sense was with the 3D sprites in Quake. Also, maybe the FEAR AI because it was revolutionary in the sense that it was the dumbest AI ever written that could fool you into thinking it was intelligent.

[Cykeisme]

I like the MOBA-like angle, though, and really wonder why hasn't there been a first person hack-and-slash MOBA-like game made yet. You know, besides the fact that I'm still working on the engine to make my own

I like it when diffusion of ideas between genres turns out well.

In fact I'm somewhat surprised that it took this long for MOBA mechanics to appear in a 1st/3rd person action game.
I'm pretty sure a lot of idle "wouldn't it be cool if..." conversations between gamers have brought up the idea before, so quality/success of a hypothetical game notwithstanding, it's odd that we haven't already seen an action title with MOBA AI mooks lane pushing already.

The current crop of competing shooters look and play the exact same with notable exceptions. You're going to be looking down the sights, sprinting long distances, and running through bombed-out shit-holes that are decidedly flat. Also, unlocks and some sort of progression because every game needs that now for some reason. Part of this is due to the arena shooter completely dieing off and Halo being run into the ground by morons.

There's always been an issue with developers jumping on the bandwagon instead of trying new things.
As for why there's even less variety now (compared to the turn of the century), I guess it's partly due to the rising costs of game development.. publishers aren't willing to throw development money at games that aren't based on tried-and-true (read: overdone) game mechanics.

Even Titanfall maintains a lot of the same familiar aspects (aiming down sights, bombed-out-shitholes, etc), and I suspect Infinity Ward only managed to get away with the robits and jetpacks because of IW's reputation as Next Big Thing Makers (they did CoD4, which opened the way for the current overdone trend we've just discussed).
--
Meanwhile, I completely agree that Counter-Strike is in its own niche. There are a lot of Counter-Strike players who will not play any other FPS games, and meanwhile, Counter-Strike fails to appeal to a lot of people who will play all sorts of different games. I doubt the latest up-engined rehash (CS: GO) has really grabbed a lot of new players; I would bet that its playerbase is composed largely of folks who were already playing the older incarnations of CS.
--
As for video game plots, I would tentatively put forward the idea that immersion is more important than the actual skeleton of the plot itself. The player has to be sucked in for the duration of the campaign, and a simple cliched plot full of "tropes" that is well executed will grant a superior experience to a truly interesting story that fails to engage the player.
That's what Bioware did.. they took basic plots and engaged the player. I don't disagree with Vendetta's judgment of Bioware plots, because not only did they reuse the same companion character archetypes, they even did the same thing several times with the main characters; at a certain point in the company's history, it seemed their games' main characters had a mandatory M. Night Shyamalan-style plot twist.

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, the plot twists do succeed in engaging the player. A video game does not need and arguably should not have a fantastically detailed, intricate plot... because ultimately the more complicated the plot, the harder it is to explain the player not having the ability to 'derail' that plot. The need for flexibility requires that to some extent the plot be "on rails;" you can procedurally generate the levels but you can't procedurally generate the plot or the voice acting.

A good video game plot is one where the rails either:

1) Lead to a very compelling place, with lots of interesting, fun stuff along the way. Star Control 2 comes to mind in my opinion- you have to do some very specific things to win, and your dialogue choices and actions really just boil down to making that final outcome easier or harder.

2) Give you multiple parallel tracks that allow you to experience more or less the same game, but pursuing different strategies to succeed, and with a very different in-story take on what you're doing and why. Bioware is fairly good at this- but it necessitates making the plot simple, and coming up with "twists" that are appropriate no matter what the player is doing.

Think about, say, Knights of the Old Republic. You can play either as a righteous Jedi, a recidivist Sith, or a 'gray' figure somewhere between those extremes. What dramatic plot events could possibly occur that would work equally well with all three of those outcomes... except a twist that revolves around the character discovering something new about their own nature, and how the character reacts to that discovery? As a Jedi you learn that you're Revan and reject that legacy; as a Sith you learn that you're Revan and embrace it, while rebelling against the Jedi Order's attempts to manipulate you. And either way you have a perfectly logical, compelling reason to confront the final boss on the final level, while a battle rages all around you... but with two very different endings to the story.

Sure, it's not the most subtle story on the shelf, but it at least manages to have some impact and earn a name for itself, within the limits of the video game genre.


...

On another note, I've been hearing about Counterstrike for like ten years now- what is it about that game that's kept it alive so long?

[Vendetta]

There's been this push in gaming over the last few years, although it's dragging out to a decade now to find the "Citizen Kane of Gaming" which is so unbelievably stupid, it's helping kill whatever innovation is left in gaming. And it's pushed by "journalists" and people who don't actually enjoy video games as where gaming needs to go..

Anyone who uses the phrase "Citizen Kane of Gaming" probably doesn't understand why Citizen Kane is the Citizen Kane of cinema.

If they did they wouldn't use the term "Citizen Kane of Gaming" as if it could be a meaningful thing. It can't, because there isn't a parent form from which games descend as there was between cinema and theatre, and therefore there can't be a work which utilises the techniques of the new form in order to show how the new form is uniquely distinct from the old form.

Citizen Kane was the Citizen Kane of cinema because it uses techniques of cinematography which were impossible in theatre but which were not yet in common use in cinema. Tracking pans, moving cameras, things which set it apart from being a play which happened to have a static camera pointed at it.

But computer gaming started by creating a new form, it wasn't even descended in its early days from non-computerised gaming, that came much later.

[TheFeniX]

There's always been an issue with developers jumping on the bandwagon instead of trying new things.
As for why there's even less variety now (compared to the turn of the century), I guess it's partly due to the rising costs of game development.. publishers aren't willing to throw development money at games that aren't based on tried-and-true (read: overdone) game mechanics.

But what exactly necessitated this increase in development costs and where is the money going? Because all I see is an area where cutscenes (usually an extremely cost-prohibitive endeavor) are pretty much gone, tons of money dumped into over-paid voice actors, and marketing out the ass. Didn't Gears of War run like 10 mil? And that was a (very very late) 360 flagship title. Granted, it was pushed by the MS marketing team, so that likely helped a lot. But Epic seems to know how to turn a profit on low sales and a fucking monster profit if a game takes off. Unlike, say Squeenix needing something like 7mil sales of Tomb Raider to turn a solid profit. See, that's bad business in my eyes because it hurts the industry. But if you don't care about the industry and merely want to gouge every fucking penny out of it, well it's working quite well. About as well as it did in the 80s.

That's the problem as how I see it. It's not "make a good game and see how much it sells." It's "A product to push 5 million units should cost X-million: spend that and see what happens while we market the shit out of it."

It doesn't help that publishers are ticking a list to hit as many people as possible, rather than focusing on solid concepts to engage a smaller sub-set of the community and try to spread by word of mouth from there. Now it's all based around pre-orders and that first week, combined with hitting as many people with ads as you can. And this is why we can't have nice things.

As for video game plots, I would tentatively put forward the idea that immersion is more important than the actual skeleton of the plot itself. The player has to be sucked in for the duration of the campaign, and a simple cliched plot full of "tropes" that is well executed will grant a superior experience to a truly interesting story that fails to engage the player.
That's what Bioware did.. they took basic plots and engaged the player. I don't disagree with Vendetta's judgment of Bioware plots, because not only did they reuse the same companion character archetypes, they even did the same thing several times with the main characters; at a certain point in the company's history, it seemed their games' main characters had a mandatory M. Night Shyamalan-style plot twist.

I don't disagree either. It's an actual complaint I have against movies as well: those that are hilariously bad in both the plot and the implementation, yet take themselves so fucking seriously. It's basically why I can't stand to watch Dark Knight Rises. It's the "rar grimdark realistic gritty Batman" but nothing holds up to scrutiny. It likes to think it's more realistic, but it's no more so than the explosion packed action movies of the 80s and 90s.

This is video game writing for the most part: even the most trite shit can hit hard if done well, but the writers tend to take themselves way to seriously. They're writing to win awards and that rarely ends well. And with video games, at least a solid implementation of gameplay mechanics can overshadow atrociously bad writing. Look at Blizzard.

Anyone who uses the phrase "Citizen Kane of Gaming" probably doesn't understand why Citizen Kane is the Citizen Kane of cinema.

Video game journalists are pretty much the definition of "doesn't understand." Same as when they say "The War and Peace of Video Games." They'd rather sound knowledgeable about video games than be knowledgeable.

Citizen Kane was the Citizen Kane of cinema because it uses techniques of cinematography which were impossible in theatre but which were not yet in common use in cinema. Tracking pans, moving cameras, things which set it apart from being a play which happened to have a static camera pointed at it.

Which is why it's even more hilarious when the same people will dump on the technology and focus on the writing. They basically want interactive movies yet probably thought video games were for losers back when those were actually a thing, usually included in your 2x CD-ROM box.

I recall one of the head writers at Bioware stating that the ability to skip gameplay (to move the story forward) is something that needs to come along with the ability to skip dialog. Can we go back to when video games were made by and for lonely nerds who don't get any?™ Because this shit is killing me.

[Oskuro]

@TheFenix: We're pretty much agreeing here. Only thing I'd point out is that, even though Counter Strike is holed up in its niche, its massive popularity has, in my opinion, affected FPS games in general, by pulling them from the run-and-gun style prevalent back then into a more "realistic" feel.

As is being said, games influence each other, even if they are not directly built upon each other.


As for the "Citizen Kane" comparison, I think people just latch on to the prestige of the label, rather than the meaning. As Vendetta explained, Citizen Kane was revolutionary for demonstrating new never before used techniques. From that perspective, the Citizen Kane of FPS games would be the original DooM, or maybe even Wolfenstein3d (or comparable titles of the era), as those games did things that had never been done before, and pretty much defined an entire genre.

But no one today would say that, because they want to use the label "Citizen Kane of Gaming" to imply awesomeness, and in an industry so obsessed with next-gen shinyness, recognizing past achievements (you know, perspective) is almost a faux pas.

[TheFeniX]

On another note, I've been hearing about Counterstrike for like ten years now- what is it about that game that's kept it alive so long?

I missed this, sorry. And it's more like 15 years now. Counter-Strike (CS) was the online game to beat for years due to accessibility. Being bundled with Half-Life obviously helped immensely, but there are other factors. So... it's rant time.

Half-life was heavily CPU dependent, which was a good thing back then because few people remember the "war" between DirectX and OpenGL. This is the original game that would run on a toaster oven, or more likely your mom's Packard Bell. To make UT and Quake (to a lesser extent) run nearly as well, you had to dig up your OpenGL drivers because MS didn't include support for OpenGL because they were assholes. Not that hard for a guy like me, but it required digging unlike for CS. OpenGL was not a vast improvement over DirectX for it. Also, you probably dropped a couple hundred bucks on a VooDoo if you played Quake or UT.

As for the gameplay, CS players might say otherwise, but the game is heavily simplified compared to Quake and Unreal Tournament (UT). 2-4 weapons max (2 of those being a knife and grenade) and only a basic understanding of the maps is required to run them. As I'm a UT guy way more than Quake, let me give you an example.

In UT, you spawn with the standard pistol and your teleporter (if enabled). You have to go out and hunt down the weapons and armor upgrades. There are other players also hunting said upgrades and you. Without better weapons a new player is toast. This leads to the concept of "working the map," which requires an understanding of where all the items spawn, the timers on which they spawn, where other players are likely to be coming from or be at certain points in the gameplay, and how to best use 1-2 of the 10 available weapons you may or may not have to kill them with. If the flak cannon is available, you'd better know how to use it because it's all you got. And it handles wildly different from something like the Shock Rifle. Larger health-pools require much more time on target to get kills, further pushing up the barrier to entry in MP. By contrast, for just one example, a skilled player can still gib you with a shock-rifle combo, unless you happen to have the shield-belt.

Contrast to CS: you buy your weapons, yet they all act essentially the same, with minor gimmicks here and there. Ex: some have burst, some have zoom, some have bolt-actions, etc. If all else fails, the starting Glock IS viable, the Desert Eagle even more so and it's ridiculously cheap. The maps are comparatively small and generally have 2-3 ways in or out of a given area and time-to-kill is very low. The rounds are also very short making the distaste of a loss the same.

The game has a skill ceiling mind you, but it's extremely easy to pick up and play and pre-2000, that was saying something. They cultivated a player-base that could easily be described as "not-gamers, but Counter-Strike players." valve picked up on this and supported the game directly for years to keep cultivating that playerbase. By the time Steam launched, they had a massive install base still playing a 5 year old game to help beta test all their ideas.

I might have vastly preferred UT over CS, but CS is easy because I could load it up right now and start wrecking people. Loading up UT would require at least a good hour or two of warm-up time to start running train and that's if I could remember the map.

@TheFenix: We're pretty much agreeing here. Only thing I'd point out is that, even though Counter Strike is holed up in its niche, its massive popularity has, in my opinion, affected FPS games in general, by pulling them from the run-and-gun style prevalent back then into a more "realistic" feel.

I think other developers took more from CSs implementation than they did from it's gameplay. And Halo was a thing way before the popularity of CoD:MW and that game was nothing but run and gun. And that's fine. I still don't think the popularity of CS impacted IW decisions with CoD:MW because accessibility was handled at that point by the 360 and Halo prepping a new playerbase of "gamers" for it.

[Oskuro]

I think CS had more of an impact on the PC military shooters. For example the battlefield series seemed to do a shift towards infantry combat that, to me, felt like an attempt to steal CS's semi-realistic close-combat thunder. Another example would be the Enemy Territory series evolving from Return To Castle Wolfenstein (a more run-and-gun experience literally using the Quake 3 engine) into a more realistic offering.

Of course, the surge in popularity of WW2 games also played a major part (Day of Defeat, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor...)

Halo was more run and gun, but I'd say what happened was a merging of styles between the console deathmatch oriented titles, and the realistic/tacticool games following CS's lead.


In conclusion, that was my point all along, that different games influence each other, genres get merged, ideas get moved around and there's little revolution, no matter what marketing says. That's not a bad thing, in my opinion, just marketers being infuriating.

Yesterday I caught an ad for titanfall, full of quotes from review sites. It always makes me laugh when some go and say a variation of "It will make your jaw drop!". Yes, it might... For a few minutes, then you get used to the graphics and they become normalized. That people still fall for that type of hype saddens me.

[DaveJB]

I recall one of the head writers at Bioware stating that the ability to skip gameplay (to move the story forward) is something that needs to come along with the ability to skip dialog.

In fairness, most of the company's other writers and game designers immediately distanced themselves from that argument, so it's probably not something we're going to see widely adopted anytime soon.

Can we go back to when video games were made by and for lonely nerds who don't get any?™ Because this shit is killing me.

We already have those. They're called indie games.

[TheFeniX]

I think CS had more of an impact on the PC military shooters. For example the battlefield series seemed to do a shift towards infantry combat that, to me, felt like an attempt to steal CS's semi-realistic close-combat thunder.

When Battlefield 1942 was released, CS was already a giant in online games played. 1942 is lacking in anything you're talking about. We saw a start of this in BF2, but the game was still much more about the "big picture" than individual soldiers or small squads. Also, 64 players servers. What you're talking about really didn't start till BF3. You know, after CoD had been kicking Battlefield's ass up and down the sales chart? As a Battlefield guy, it was pretty damned sad. The series always pulled good numbers. But they weren't CoD numbers, so EA decided to idiot things up a notch.

And really, why would anyone want the CS audience? They bought one game and played it for a decade. That's not how you make money, unless you play the long game like valve did. EA isn't about the long game.

Halo was more run and gun, but I'd say what happened was a merging of styles between the console deathmatch oriented titles, and the realistic/tacticool games following CS's lead.

Unlikely. The concept for Halo either pre-dates or was around the same time as CS. Microsoft just bought up Bungie and put Halo on ice for the Xbox, even though Bungie was by far a Mac developer. Halo stood on it's Single-player and co-op options, not on the Multiplayer which lacked online support and was horrendously imbalanced (the best weapon in the game, BY FAR, was the pistol). It's unlikely it was modeled on anything but Bungie knowing how to make a good game, as it's pretty likely the game was done and just needed to be ported and polished as MSs flagship title.

Can we go back to when video games were made by and for lonely nerds who don't get any?™ Because this shit is killing me.

We already have those. They're called indie games.

Yes, there's good ideas coming out of the independent realm. But there's also almost as much dogshit as with big time developers. It's sad that gamers are so fucking desperate for something original or that at least harks back to their childhood, they'll throw money at any asshole who promises nostalgia (almost always in lieu of quality).

[Oskuro]

When Battlefield 1942 was released, CS was already a giant in online games played. 1942 is lacking in anything you're talking about. We saw a start of this in BF2 [snip] What you're talking about really didn't start till BF3.

Exactly the reason why I still love BF1942 but don't really like the sequels. BF2142 seemed to try something new with the Titan gameplay and stompy mechs, but I guess it didn't work out for them.

Unlikely. The concept for Halo either pre-dates or was around the same time as CS.

No no, I didn't mean that Halo was a merging of styles, I meant that, after Halo, there was a merging of Halo's run-and-gun style, and of the more "realistic" military shooters out there, leading to the current situation.
Heck, at least Halo had an in-game explanation for regenerating health


Then again, I think Halo's major contribution was to make shooters viable on consoles, and probably the console-oriented design has had a much bigger impact on game design than the particular styles of previous games.

Yes, there's good ideas coming out of the independent realm. But there's also almost as much dogshit as with big time developers. It's sad that gamers are so fucking desperate for something original or that at least harks back to their childhood, they'll throw money at any asshole who promises nostalgia (almost always in lieu of quality).

Meh, I think it is still a good thing. All this is like having one of those illnesses you get growing up, you suffer through it and come out stronger (or die). Videogames as a medium need not only that developers offer better material, but also that the audience grows up and starts putting some thought into what they buy.

Personally, I'd rather have this overcrowded market where, from time to time, some truly awesome things come out, than go back to the previous model, where it was either the AAA industry's way, or the highway.

[Losonti Tokash]

This first clip is mine, the other three belong to Stark.









Man, what a dumb game. COD with robots.

[Oskuro]

Man, what a dumb game. COD with robots.

And people on this thread have said Tintanfall is a bad game.... where exactly?

[SAMAS]

I don't think anyone has said it's bad, per se, just.... well, as noted above, simply Call of Duty with giant robots. I.e.: are the mechs just a window dressing to the same ol' gameplay you've been getting out of the FPS genre for the past four or five years.

I'm not getting an Xbone anytime soon, but as a digger of Giant Robots I do kinda hope it takes off.

[Zeropoint]

Yeah, that's my take on it. If I'm playing a game in which I drive a giant robot, I want it to feel like I'm driving a giant robot, which means there needs to be a meaningful difference in gameplay from a game where I play a guy running around on his own.

[Me2005]

Hope I'm not Necro'ing too bad here, but I feel like there are some ... misconceptions about this title.

I'm not getting an Xbone anytime soon, but as a digger of Giant Robots I do kinda hope it takes off.

Titanfall runs absolutely great on 360. Go out and rent it from redbox this weekend and play it on your current machine if you need to verify. I've also heard rumors of a possible Playstation release later this/early next year, though I don't know if it'll also be last-gen. The point is that it is definitely not a flagship title for MS/the XBone.

[Crossroads Inc.]

So I am hoping to get some advice or help here…

My partner just recently got me the game on the basis "I LOVE Giant Robots" without evidently doing any other research first

So to start with, I normally HATE First Person Shooter games, so already I am at a disadvantage as this seems to basically be "FPS + Robots"
So far I've played a couple of games (mostly the "Attrition" game choice) and oy vey! I seriously walk a few steps and get killed.

The FPS that I enjoyed the most was the old UNreal Tournament games, mostly because vehicles in that game were a rather strong asset. (I was very VERY good driving a tank) And there was a lot of "support" rolls. Running around with those machine healing guns always made me feel useful

So… First of is there an FFA option? or game mode options that are more "silly" and less serious? Like, an ALL robot map?
Or just running around with the games equivalent of a rocket launcher?
Already been reading some "How to's" And it really does seem like "COD + Robots" and from what I read, game play wise they act just like a Bigger version of you.

What maps or methods of gameplay have other enjoyed? Or recommend for a total and utter noob?

[Joviwan]

There's no FFA option. There is a mode called Last Titan Standing which has everyone start in Titans, last man standing wins. There are no silly modes

Play the tutorial a few times so that you get more practice down with the basics and handling. Titans DO NOT handle the same way Pilots do, unless for some reason "Still uses wasd" means "exactly the same" to you. By the same token, "CoD+robots" is not an accurate summary of gameplay.

Matchmaking should, at some point, drop you into the appropriate skill tier. If you liked UT a lot, then you should practice your parkour skills so you can get back the sense of verticality that UT had. (Training tip: Do not use stairs. if you ever find you are using stairs, you are not Parkouring enough. keep that in mind and you should start flexing your full range of motion more reliably. Eventually you'll start discovering all of the Parkour Trails that are scattered throughout the map, or start developing your own)

Are you on PC or a console?

My personal favorite map is probably Airbase, for the combination of close-quarters nooks and crannies, long ranges, cover, and layering. It leaves a lot of room for all play-styles (farming, CQC, sniping, stealth, run-n-gun, titan slugfest, trap-laying, search and destroy).

If you find you're getting killed a lot, remember that every time you fire your gun, you show up on enemy radar, and the only way around that is to get a silencer on your weapon. That'll make it passingly more difficult to locate you, which means more time to figure out what you're doing. The flipside applies, obviously: enemies pilots with unsilenced weapons show up on your radar.

Every time you wall-run or double jump while Cloaked, enemies can see your jump-pack exhaust, making it easier to target you.

When playing Attrition mode, don't feel obligated to hunt down and kill pilots. You can help your team out a lot by farming the footsoldiers and robot infantry.

As you play more, you'll unlock more gear and gun attachments. The default gun (R-101 carbine) is a good gun in all categories and once you get some sights for it, it really shines.

If you're farming footsoldiers, I find a Silenced smart-pistol and the Minion Detector make a great combination. Circle around the outside of the engagement til you reach the enemy minions, blow them away without showing up on radar.

As far as piloting titans, my preference is the starting titan+40mm canon. It provides the most flexibility and rewards accuracy without punishing failure too hard. You probably haven't unlocked them, yet, but I tend to run with the cluster munitions and electric smoke, specifically to deal with pilots jumping on my titan to wreck my shit.