STACK #145 Nov 2016

FEATURE GAMES

titan, and independently of your weapon. We wanted the players to have as many options as possible to make the game as personal an experience as we could get.” Welch goes on to describe the new mechanic introduced for Titanfall 2 : pilot and titan interplay. “It creates this wonderful dynamic between not only your pilot and your titan, but other people’s pilots and titans as well. For example; you can have a small pilot on the back of a titan trying to rip his battery pack out, and the pilot then goes and puts it into his titan, or a friendly titan, and you end up working together to demolish the other guy. It’s a great new mechanic.” Emslie adds that Titanfall 2 is more co-op focused, where its predecessor was very much a lone wolf experience. “When we went to Titanfall 2 , we were thinking to ourselves, how can we put a sense of team and camaraderie into the players, where they’re actually communicating with each other and doing crazy tactical stuff? I've seen it shift the balance of war.” It’s clear that the team at Respawn always have the players in mind – Titanfall 2 will receive full post-launch support, gratis. Although Welch reminds us that this was the practice with the first game. “If you think back to Titanfall , we provided eight to nine major content updates for free, and we’ll be doing the same this time around. We have said publicly, multiple times, loud and clear, that we are going to always provide the maps and weapons and modes for free. People aren’t going to have to pay for that kind of stuff. We love building our audience, and we love giving back to them. As long as people are loving the game and playing it, we’re always going to continue to support it.”

espawn Entertainment began as a collection of former Infinity Ward employees. The studio's first title,

Titanfall – an Xbox exclusive – released back in 2014. Now, following the huge success of the original, they’ve dropped a follow-up. The inaugural Titanfall was a notably multiplayer-only experience. For the game’s sequel, the team wanted to enter new territory. “Coming out of Titanfall , we realised that multiplayer was neat, and it was a good idea at the time, but we wanted to move the series forward,” offers art director Joel Emslie. “We still wanted the two teams to work in tandem, and not have this disconnected experience.” One of the most crucial elements in the evolution from multiplayer to single-player was continuity in the AI. If the game’s namesake titans weren’t controlled, meticulous and responsive, there wasn’t really much point. “Even though we evolved [AI] more for Titanfall 2 , its origins were already great. It just came down to figuring how to work all these things into a narrative – balancing it all together and finding the right ingredients of the AI from multiplayer to translate it into single player as well.” The aforementioned narrative drew heavy inspiration from – you guessed it – James Cameron’s Avatar , amongst other things. “The story itself has a little bit of Portal , a little bit of Half-Life – some inspiration from Blaster Master on the old Nintendo”, laughs Emslie. “There’s a tiny bit of a Metroid vibe. There are all these inspirations that we were thinking about when we were writing it. The root of the story is your interaction with BT – this giant robot. So there’s definitely a little bit of James Cameron in there.“ Players are able to get in and out of these giant robots as they please, increasing the potential for exploration – and collectables. “When BT’s walking around, when no-one’s piloting him, he goes left handed,” says Emslie. “It was just a detail to drive home the fact that he’s on his own. When the pilot hops into BT, he becomes a righty. I’ve played through single-player maybe five times, and I keep going back to it and finding new things, because of the fact that you can get out of your Titan. “As you become more confident interacting with your titan, it opens the world up to you. There are a lot of little opportunities along the way to find secret areas and arenas to fight as a pilot. There’s a real replayability to the

• Titanfall 2 is out now

single-player, which I love.” Customisation changes were also a focus for the team when heading into the sequel.“ There's an extraordinary level of customisation

available,” says Respawn Entertainment COO Dusty Welch, “not only for the pilot, but now the titans as well. The progression system, too, is amazingly deep in terms of the unlocks and propelling you forward. You’ll be able to level up your pilot independently of your

Joel Emslie: “When it comes to doing the tech test, I want to get this out loud and clear – the team responds, listens to all that feedback. We agonise over it. We read every sentence, we’re all over it. Our ears are wide open. If something isn’t working in the game, and the community really doesn’t like it, it’s not going to stay that way – we’re going to fix it. We want to make the best game possible, and the only way to do that is to actually have a large community of people being – surprisingly, and some cases extremely - passionate about the way things were in the past. We’re too close to the project in the studio; but once we do something like a tech test, we receive really passionate feedback. Something I'm most proud of on the tech test is that we heard feedback one weekend, and by the next weekend we had those fixes in place and working. That’s something that you don’t get with these larger teams." Respawn listens

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