Titanfall, Respawn’s risky bid to kill bolt-on singleplayer campaigns

July 24th, 2013, 00:26 Posted By: wraggster

Titanfall is a comfortably brown military FPS backed by Microsoft, but it’s still a risk for Respawn. Not because gamers are due to give up on fetishising guns this gen, but in a world where every multiplayer shooter has an arbitrary campaign for the express purpose of cutting trailers and adding perceived value, Titanfall has none.“In our game, multiplayer is the campaign,” says lead designer Mackey McCandlish. “Every level has a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. You play as a Pilot – they’re soldiers with extra manoeuvrability – but the battlefield is also populated with AI grunts to fill out the scene, and talk, and bring Titanfall that grounded reality that AI characters have been bringing to singleplayer for a long time.”Titanfall is the latest product of the sci-fi revival. As McCandlish points out, Saving Private Ryan kickstarted the early 2000s’ WWII obsession and Black Hawk Down helped spawn the modern military shooter, but Titanfall will thrive off the back of Prometheus and District 9 with its galaxy-spanning tale of mech (the titular Titans) war.As players join the servers, they populate massive dropships. After a brief recruitment phase, these warp over the battlefield and disgorge Pilots from above. “Our game is still infantry-based; we’re not building colossal maps for tanks, but we have to build for big infantry and small infantry, and then we have to build so that the small infantry have useful spaces to get an advantage over the Titans. Every map is small enough to be lovingly hand-crafted [and] to take advantage of this scale disparity you get between the cat and mouse, the Titans and Pilots.”

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