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FEATURE
GAMES
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
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
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.”
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
•
Titanfall 2
is out now