Titanfall 2 Will Be Quicker, Involve Titans Sooner

As part of the 1% who had little complaints about the tech test for Titanfall 2, it’s good to see that Respawn are doing things to ensure the 99% stay happy – I don’t want to be playing one other guy over and over again when it launches.

The finished article won’t play like the one we saw over the weekend, they announced in a recent blog post.

Respawn were open to comments and critiques (of which there were plenty) throughout the whole process and stressed that all feedback would be taken onboard. Well, that isn’t just PR talk – after social media updates showed the team discussing feedback, it looks like the meetings reaped some compromise. Titanfall 2 will be quicker to play and will give you Titans much quicker, which was one of my only complaints during the tech test.

On the subject of mobility, their statement said:

“Many players are wondering why we changed the mobility from Titanfall 1. We identified two major issues we wanted to solve in Titanfall 2. The first is that a lack of player predictability would often cause players to be shot from the back or sides. While flanking is an important part of gameplay death often felt random instead of skillful. The second issue is that close range firefights were overly chaotic due to erratic player movement. So, changes to pilot mobility stemmed from a desire to improve our gunplay, and not a desire to slow down movement.

We’ll be tuning air speed and wall-running speed to be faster.”

Wallrunning was also heavily criticised, but Respawn are on it:

“While investigating this point, we discovered some unintended side effects that were causing players to lose momentum while wallrunning.

Players should once again accumulate and retain more speed when chaining wallruns.”

Something which I couldn’t agree with for the tech test, as I’ve already mentioned, was the relative lack of Titans during rounds. As they were effectively killstreak bonuses, the better team would always get them first (sometimes in numbers) and then it would be much harder for the “underdogs” to get anywhere apart from a grind towards defeat, usually without even being able to call in Titans.

That’s also changing, going back to how it was in the first game:

“We made some changes in Titanfall 2 with the goal of rewarding players for playing game mode objectives. However, we observed the problem that players can try to play the objective but fail, resulting in slower than intended Titan acquisition. We still want objectives to be the fastest way to get a Titan, but the goal of every player being guaranteed a Titan per match hasn’t changed.

Pilots will once again acquire a small passive amount of Titan meter every few seconds.”

Respawn also revealed that Titanfall 2 will come with other changes, including improvements to the HUD and Titan mobility, as well as assuring players that all of the maps won’t be like the expansive ones we saw during the tech test.

It’s almost as if this weekend was an exercise in gaining feedback and learning from it for a AAA game. That sounds suspicious, it isn’t like them to actually act on feedback at all.

While I was happy with Titanfall 2 as it was, these changes are welcome. Here’s hoping they update the game before the weekend when it has its second tech test, which will undoubtedly happen.