The game just came out and it isn’t doing so hot. Understandable, as it was released during a jam packed season. But man, I’m having a blast on the PC. I’m really, really bad right now bitty it’s still fun swinging on a grappling hook to land on my Titan.
Anyone else playing?
Aye, having a lot of fun with it. Probably my favourite singleplayer shooter this year, which I’m surprised to say after Doom. Campaign is short, but very sweet. (The “shift” mission deserves a shoutout in any 2016 level design award, at the very least.)
Multi’s fun so far, but I’m dealing with a lot of very conservative opponents who tend to roam in packs as pilots instead of spreading out. So far that’s a winning strategy - a competent team of Pilots with a mix of AP and AT weapons will steamroll just about anything short of a full-titan team.
I wish there was more communication in-game.
For any who haven’t played yet, there’s going to be a free multiplayer weekend starting December 2 (Nov. 30 if you’re an EA member).
Tried it over the free weekend. It seems extremely similar to Titanfall 1. I’m not sure I’d be able to tell which one was which unless I was watching them side by side.
The pilot gameplay is just fatiguing. There’s a lot of mobility for the pilots, which means if you’re trying to awkwardly flap your flippers on a gamepad it’s really hard to hit anything or anything to hit you. So in response, so that people can actually get killed, they have to make it so that even a tiny split second of fire on targets will kill them (otherwise you’d have this ridiculous time where players had these protracted fights awkwardly circling each other and missing most shots). Of course when you’re not awkwardly flippering a gamepad, and you’re using precise controls, then it means that you can get yourself on target and instantly kill people. Which is just annoying, dying instantly over and over without having any chance to react to it or even know where it came from. Or even when you get kills, it wasn’t the result of a satisfying fight between two people - you just saw them before they saw you. I don’t know why we can’t just acknowledge this fact and give players in the PC versions of games 4x as much health instead of us having to deal with instant time to kill so that console fights don’t last 90 awkward seconds.
And just like the Call of Duty games, the pilot weapon design is boring, samey, and all upside and no downsides. Every weapon is a fast firing, no recoil, super accurate, high capacity, fast-reloading, all-range death dealer. Everything is good at everything. You don’t have to learn the skills of using the weapons, or learning their individual play styles - just spray wildly with your laser death beam and you’ll kill plenty of things. And I guess what does it even matter - if you’re going to design for people having autoaim anyway so why would a weapon need personality? The whole concept is absurd to me.
The titan gameplay is the total opposite. They have a variety of weapons that dictates different playstyles and different tactics to approach fights. They can take plenty of hits and so the fights have a lot of play and counter-play, and more teamwork involved. The general design and control of the Titans is a lot of fun.
If the pilot gameplay was designed like the titan gameplay (increase player health by about 4x, give weapons some actual strengths and weaknesses and require some skill) it’d probably be a really good game. The engine, controls, aesthetic, movement systems work really well. It has the obnoxious call of duty style dopamine-injection rat-lever YAY YOU GOT A THING AND YOU DID A THING AND YOU GOT ANOTHER THING constant unlocks, but at least the cosmetic unlocks are pretty cool.
The whole grunt/NPC mechanic still feels super gimmicky to me. It’s not even like a MOBA where they’re a part of the battle because you’re trying to push the map with them or anything like that. They’re basically just random cannon fodder that can’t present a threat to you that are randomly scattered around to make 6v6 seem less empty.
Meh, I’ll pick it up when it’s $5 if there’s still a player base by then.