“There were three core mechanics we wanted,” explains producer Drew McCoy. “Mobility, survivability and scale. Once the Titans started to come in you naturally started to get this longer lifespan, and even if you get destroyed you can eject and keep living. A lot can happen in a single life.”
Living is easy in Titanfall. Certainly a shotgun to the chest will drop a Pilot in one hit, but Pilots are so mobile and the maps so large that there’s always a way out of any compromising shootout. Every Pilot has an anti-Titan weapon, a double jump, gravity-defying footwear, and a cloaking system that’s especially effective against a Titan’s optics when making a break across open ground. Rack up enough kills or just wait long enough and you’ll call in a customised Titan of your own, effectively wrapping your pilot in a tank costume and adding an extra life to your current spawn. Those are all the tools Titanfall needs to break free of the Call Of Duty spawn-die-spawn-die loop.
“It’s not boom-you’re-dead, boom-you’re-dead,” says McCoy. “Because you move so fast, it’s not about who [aims quickest]; it’s about who outmanoeuvres the other. I think it’s a response to the fact that we’re all getting older and our reaction times aren’t what they used to be. I want to hop into a game and not feel like every 14-year-old is going to dominate me. I want a fighting chance and I don’t want to feel I’m screwed if I didn’t get in on the first week.”
Such survivability should prohibit large bodycounts but Titanfall’s maps are target-rich environments, populated by dozens of AI soldiers run by Microsoft’s dedicated servers. All of them put up a decent enough fight to be trouble, but they’re thick and flimsy enough to be worth fewer points than a Pilot or Titan kill. “AI grunts keep that quick time-to-kill feedback loop,” says McCoy. “When you can kill three guys in eight seconds, that’s good – but when you’re on the other side of that, it’s not. If you run into a group of AI [units] you can take them out, and you still have that gameplay loop of doing things, achieving things, killing people.”