Coming off the back of a (mostly) beautiful weekend with Titanfall 2, I was eager to talk to my fellow pilots about how much fun was had, how it seems to be the game I had hoped Titanfall 1 would be. After taking a glance through the official subreddit and the official Facebook page, I realised that I might need to keep my opinions to myself or face a public lynching.
People hated the new Titanfall.
The subreddit had essentially turned into the game’s complaint box, full of commenters criticising the game and its changes. It was a similar story on the Facebook page: comparisons to Call of Duty were hitting dangerous levels with only a few positive voices to be heard.
Admittedly, my time spent with the original Titanfall stretched to the three-month window after its release – I had the impression that these guys and girls had been playing it devotedly all the way up to now. A lot of the game’s criticisms came down to the slowness at acquiring Titans (which is a fair point, it is too slow) and that it had a generic, slow vibe to it.
I think some of them are suffering from NAS: New Album Syndrome.
Imagine finding a new artist that you love and admire, eventually bordering on an obsession with their first album. You repeatedly play the same tracks, learn them word for word, and sing their praises wherever you can. They are your band, and a pox on any of their detractors.
But then their second album drops. It’s not quite the same style you’re used to; none of the new tracks seem to be able to match their earlier work as the songs you have been obsessively listening to almost every day can’t be matched. They’re ingrained on your brain.
As hyperbolic as reports about Titanfall’s sudden demise were at the time, it’s hard to deny that there were plenty who stuck with it, playing the same maps all the time, calling down the same Titans in the same way every round, hurriedly evacuating to the extraction after a loss using the same shortcuts.
Titanfall 2, in my eyes, isn’t drastically different enough from the original game to warrant such an online mauling. Yes, it’s less about the gigantic robots falling from the sky and more about travelling from building to building with a grappling hook, but by and large, it still has that same fluid, responsive feel that its competitors have cynically tried to match and had success with.
The biggest criticism I have for Titanfall 2 is that it feels too similar, like the incremental changes aren’t going to convince people that it’s changed for the better. Although I’ve spent plenty of time defending the game, I had the nagging sensation during the tech test that it might still struggle to keep players invested in it once the initial hype wore off. A common complaint I keep seeing is that all the original Titanfall needed was a single-player campaign to reach greatness and that these changes feel like ten steps back. That’s not true at all: the original game needed a hell of a lot more than that.
I believe in Respawn, as silly as it is to trust a developer to deliver in the 21st century. They know they fucked it with the original by not including a single-player campaign and failing to deliver enough variety with the content, so that’s why that’s being fixed for the sequel (you would hope). I’m also not naive enough to suggest that its problems will be drastically overhauled for the full release, but I think the tech test only really shows the tip of the iceberg: there’s still plenty under the surface of Titanfall 2 that they’ve been keeping under wraps.
But, why does it have to be the next big eSports thing, or a game that wins awards and a public blessing from the Pope? Strip back all the little components that make Titanfall what it is and you see what the game’s really all about: pure escapism with big robots and parkour. Even if it’s just for a few minutes or hours, playing games should be all about shrugging off the weight of real life to lose yourself in a different world. Titanfall 2 does that perfectly, just like its predecessor. That’s why I will probably still be picking up the game, if only to remind myself that life is hard and sometimes all you need is some time with a robot that shoots lasers out of its chest to make it all fade away. Even if I end up only playing it for a week or a month, I am fine with that.
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