The first hour I spent with the Titanfall beta left me feeling underwhelmed.
Having grown tired of the increasingly stagnant FPS genre, with its annual releases of Call of Duty that are challenged only by the occasional Battlefield game and half-baked military shooters such as Medal of Honor, despite all the hype placed behind it following its E3 2013 reveal, Titanfall initially seemed not too dissimilar from the contemporaries that it was so fervently being pitched against. In fact, it seemed a little worse. The two maps that the beta offers seemed empty, overpopulated by bots (as our Joey Davidson noted in his controversial piece) and with only the occasional run-ins with human players spicing up the action.
Then, after roughly two hours of playtime, something clicked. I began adding wall-running and jet-packing into my repertoire of tactics, rather than viewing them as mere superfluous additions to an otherwise standard shooter. I began using the Titans strategically rather than immediately hopping inside of them, commanding them to either follow me around the battlefield as I attempted to deal out more damage on-foot, or telling them to guard a control point in the Hardpoint game type (Titanfall‘s answer to Domination), distracting enemy Titans from me while I stood atop a vantage point and pummeled them with rockets.
I soon came to understand the necessity of the bots, too. Whereas I was initially of the opinion that they were being implemented to distract players from the lack of humans on the field, I came to understand that this was a requirement so that the game’s bread and butter, the Titans, wouldn’t litter each map, and that developer Respawn wouldn’t be forced to put them behind some form of killstreak. The great thing about Titanfall is that these Titans are accessible to each and every player, rather than being solely designated to the best players on each team.
Killing your fellow players and bots earns you ‘Attrition points’, which speeds up the countdown to you earning your Titan, with bots earning you significantly less points than offing human players does. Limiting the game’s player cap to 6v6 matches ensures that these Titans are still a huge facet of each team’s march to victory, but they don’t consume the gameplay as you might expect. Having a limited number of players on the field brings with it a limited amount of Titans, allowing you to still slip under their radar whilst on-foot in order to keep shooting down enemies, trying desperately to stay out of their line of sight whilst hopping from building to building, wall to wall.
Since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the FPS genre has been routinely giving us what we expect it to. Ironsights, killstreaks etc. have all become as much a part of shooters as camping snipers and 14-year-olds shouting homophobic slurs down their headsets, but Titanfall has came along as a complete revitalization of the fundamentals of the genre which we have become so accustomed to. Whereas matches of Call of Duty et al could still be exciting within a certain context, such as closely fought battles or when playing with a large group of friends, Titanfall has once again made the basics enjoyable.
While it still remains to be seen whether or not the full game will offer enough content to justify its price point and keep us playing until the inevitable Titanfall 2, it is plain to see from the beta alone that in terms of its gameplay, developer Respawn has made a ballsy move in its strong attempt to completely shake up a genre which as of late has been dragging its feet. If Titanfall becomes as popular as its beta suggests it will be, then FPS fans can look forward to a new franchise that has managed to make shooting fun again.
