Hi everyone.
So today we're taking a look at the Titanfall beta.
Now much has been made of Titanfall, it's the next big game coming out of Electronic Arts
and the guys at Respawn. Now the guys at Respawn, they were former
Call of Duty developers, they were actually the originators of Call of Duty
and so this is kind of a game we've all been waiting for really to see
what those guys would do next. Now the first thing I think we have to really
discuss with Titanfall is where it's taking its inspiration from
because a lot of people kind of think, oh, it's very CoD-ish.
You know, It's got that Call of Duty vibe going on but actually I don't think it is quite so much a
Call of Duty game as it were.
It's much closer to a game called Blacklight Retribution
which kind of already did the stompy stompy mech thing. You know, kill lots of people
get points. Call in a mech,stomp around in the mech, anti-mech weapons are available
etcetera for those people who aren't in a mech
and there's a lot here that is very reminiscent of
what the guys were doing with Blacklight Retribution but then you take
Mirror's Edge
which was another Electronic Arts game which did the parkour free running
and bring that in as well and so what we really have is a triple play here.
You've got the kind of fast-paced action of Call of Duty. You've got the fast-paced
action and mechs from Blacklight Retribution and you've got the
free-running
from Mirror's Edge. Now actually you might think Mmmm, that sounds like a
difficult combination to make work. But actually it's all credit to the guys at
Respawn that they've pulled off
a blinder here. The gameplay is really solid.
Whilst there are some significant problems with the frame rate on the Xbox One
which in my opinion doesn't look like something they're going to be able to fix
before
launch. The gameplay is
stunning. It fixes everything that was wrong with Call of Duty in my eyes for the last few
years.
It's quite remarkable that adding those gameplay elements can immediately make the game A)
feel more fluid, B) Feel like you actually have a chance of surviving
longer than about three seconds and it opens up
this kind of verticality to the gameplay that's kind of been missing from shooters in
my opinion.
This idea of being able to, you know, double jump between
various, you know, world elements onto mechs,
onto buildings, running along buildings,
it just works incredibly well. Now
graphic wise this game does look better on PC.
It also plays better on PC as well. The frame rate
is much more solid. In testing we've seen
the frame rate on the Xbox One dipping quite dramatically
when there's a lot of heavy action going on on screen, specifically if you have
maybe
two or three mechs on screen at the same time, one or two of those mechs happens
to be on fire
and you can watch the frame rate really take a bath.
This is a fairly significant issue for a game that realistically needs to be
hitting
a stable 60 frames-per-second throughout and unfortunately this is something that we've
seen quite a bit from the Xbox One. Tomb Raider for instance,
Battlefield and other games just haven't been able to maintain a consistent frame
rate unfortunately.
Now there is still time before the game is actually released and we were playing
a beta
so it may very well be somewhat behind the actual code base
that Respawn are using and also there are some updates coming from Microsoft which
hopefully will unleash a little bit more power
within the Xbox One. But at this stage if the game does launch
with this frame rate problem that it has at the moment, especially when we're seeing
things like screen tearing going on.
It is is just ugly on a console then I think that is going to be something
people will be
focusing on at launch. Certainly I think reviewers are going to be hard pressed not
to mention it
because it is fairly extreme at times. Now, contrast that to the PC version of
the game
where the frame rate dropped at worst by
two frames a second. So in our testing we were seeing 58 frames a second in
very, very heavy scenes and 60 frames a second solid throughout the rest
of the time. Now interestingly the game is capped at 60 frames a second.
We use 120 frames a second monitors here
and there was no way that we could find to effectively unleash
the full raw power of the gaming PC that we use here.
So unfortunately we weren't unable to kind of see what the frame rate would be like and
the smoothness of the game
if it was just uncapped and allowed to just go for it on the PC.
So there does seem to be a hard cap on both systems at
60 frames a second. The PC with, you know,
not the the most stunning of up-to-date equipment as it were
a core i7 with 16 gig of ram , a couple of SSD drives
and a 7950 overclocked to, well,
approximately 7980 I think it is specs.
It's a fairly beefy PC but at the same time it is not the most cutting-edge
system out there. So it was very interesting really to see how Titanfall
was running on these two systems
and gameplay-wise, the frame rate drops on the Xbox One
weren't at any point something I would call a deal breaker.
In fact the more you actually played the game the less you kind of cared about the
frame rate dipping in and out.
But it could at times be a little jarring
and especially if you're trying to take out a pilot running around underneath a
Titan. The Titan's on fire and
your frame rate's popping and hopping.
You try killing somebody like that. It's quite difficult actually.
But again, it wasn't something that made me kind of go Grrr.
or throw controller out of the window. It was something more like, well I hope they get
this fixed,
you know, because the gameplay is brilliant
but frame rate is all-important on a console. We can't really have a multi-player
shooter with a frame rate
popping up and down all over the place. So I do hope Respawn get that fixed. Now
one of the things I found quite interesting is how the
kind of character progression is working in Titanfall, because
it's kind of got that CoD element so as you kind of level up your pilot you
unlock new weapons, you unlock perks
but they have these things called burn cards and they're really
cool. They add a kind of twist into the gameplay mechanic which can
I reckon as the game opens up when it's finally released
will add kind of an extra element of risk and chaos
into those opening four minutes certainly, of
Titanfall's gameplay. Now
each match essentially has a kind of
two stages I suppose you could say. The opening four minutes is when everyone is waiting for their
Titan.
Whenever you kill an enemy pilot, an enemy Titan or
AI minions, what will happen is your
Titan timer will reduce, thus getting your timer
faster, your Titan faster. Now,
these burn cards have a variety of effects, including allowing you to
reduce your Titan timer by 40, 80 seconds or
call an ogre immediately. Now this can really change the gameplay up because
suddenly people aren't expecting a Titan to be stomping around in the first sort of two
minutes of gameplay
and suddenly there's a Titan stomping around in the first two minutes of gameplay.
You suddenly change the dynamic of the battlefield and you can give your team
that extra edge. I can see that coming into play
really nicely. Certainly if this game becomes an e-sport where
suddenly everybody is spawning ogres right at the beginning of the match
to try and give their team that initial win or tactically
rolling out those ogres from their burn cards at just the right moment to give
themselves an edge.
The burn cards that we've seen so far are pretty fun. There's everything from
kind of, you know, double damage weaponry to
calling in boosted Titans, to being able to respawn exactly where you died.
Just, you know,, if you want that revenge basically on the person that killed you. It's
really. really cool.
Like I say, I think it really changes up the dynamic of the gameplay really nicely.
Now just talking about the the AI in this game and it's an area where quite a few of us
have been kind of going. Uh?
How is that going to work and does it actually work in practice?
It felt a little Moberish to me when we were kind of looking at the early footage and
when
Respawn were actually talking about the game and to a certain extent
it is a little bit Moberish but without the kind of
lanes going on. Mobs, or AI
as it were will kind of spawn in to the battlefield and they'll do their own thing they're
not under your control.
They kind of have their own agenda, they'll wander the map. If they see enemy pilots
or Titans or enemy AI they'll hunker down and start shooting at it. And it's all
animated really well. The idea behind them really is to kind of pad out the maps
because otherwise
these maps would be feeling quite sparse with only 6 V6 and certainly
at the beginning, the first four minutes of the game it would feel
really lonely actually. So the AI does help to bring,
you know, a little bit of character to the world and bring the world to life a little
bit.
Whether they are actually necessary, I really don't know.
Personally I think we would have been better off seeing a 10 league
10 or 12 V2-game without the AI in there.
And I don't think it would have made much of a difference, one way or the other.
I think it would have created a more thrilling game during those
opening kind of few minutes. One of the problems I found with the AI
is it's actually quite difficult to spot who is AI and who is an enemy
pilot, ie another player, unless that enemy player happens to, you know, suddenly double jump into the air or
fly down
off the top of a building or something. And, so, you know,
you kind of get this thing where suddenly like Yeah, Yeah!, I've just killed four guys
and then it's like, Oh, they were just AI. Oh well!
at least my Titan will be a bit quicker. It doesn't have the same kind of
woohoo awesome impact as taking out a pilot does
so Mmm in some respects it
makes me feel like well, is this going to impact the longevity of the game to a
certain extent that we've kind of got this
weird hybrid multi-player, single player shooter thing going on
and the AI just doesn't really feel all that necessary to the gameplay.
You could well do without it. Bump the player count and I think things would be just as fine there
really. So all-in-all
I think Titanfall is going to be a fantastic game.
The niggles I have with it really are down to
how well this thing is going to be running on the Xbox One when it actually
arrives on there.
I don't honestly believe we are going to see this frame rate smoothed out
in time for launch. I think a lot of this really is down to the limitations within
the Xbox One at this point.
Xbox fan boys, you can bleat on as much as you like that I'm wrong.
Ultimately the evidence now is stacking up,
not in your favour on this one really and, you know,
if Titanfall does launch with a ropey frame rate then
I think it really does cement everything I've been saying over the last, you know,
few months, that the Xbox One is looking
rather power constrained at this point especially when we look at what we're
getting on the PC which is
vastly cleaner textures in my opinion, much higher frame rates,
stable frame rates, which is really the key thing here.
Can Microsoft sort out the frame rate on the Xbox One? I hope so because
it's kind of embarrassing seeing a console
that is struggling at this point, when you know, other systems aren't having these kind
of problems.
And a lot of it comes down to, you know, if Microsoft have these first party exclusives
and obviously they feel that that's how they're going to try and stay
ahead of the market,
well we will see at launch how many units of Titanfall actually ships.
There's an estimated what, four, four-and-a half, maybe five million
Xbox Ones out there in the world. I think it's going to ship about two-and-a-half to
three million copies myself.
I think this is going to be a big seller but
what we'll have to actually see is what the trade-in is like on this game.
If people get sick of it after a month then they've got a problem.
Titanfall has to be able to support a player base for an entire year
until the next Titanfall is released. They have to copy the Call of Duty,
Battlefield kind of formula here because ultimately that's what EA is going to be
looking for. When we actually look at what Titanfall is, it's actually a very simple game
from a design point of view, because we've got rid of the single player stuff.
You get rid of the single player elements and suddenly you're going to be able to
turn around a multi-player game
much much faster. That's why most free-to- play games are multi-player games
because instead of having to spend three years to make a AAA title
you can do in 12 to 18 months instead because you're just focusing on the
single-player component which
ultimately is smaller maps less interaction, less animation etcetera, etcetera.
So I certainly would expect to see Titanfall every single year.
What I want to kind of get a feel for really is how Titanfall is going to
have.... is Titanfall going to have that longevity in the marketplace to carry itself
full, fully through a full year each time? I'm not so sure but we will see when that
single player
elements, well the campaign mode as it's being called on Titanfall,
it's really kind of like the single player part of the game. But what we've been
playing really
is kind of like some Deathmatch maps I suppose you could call it.
When we see this campaign mode,hopefully that will give us our linking
story.
We'll get a better idea of the kind of how people want, how to
Respawn want us to kind of feel about this game from a story point of view
which I think is what draws a lot of people in initially. You know? It certainly draws me in.
But anyway, that's Titanfall. I would love to know what your experiences of the
beta have been so far. Do let us know in the comments, do drop us a like
and, you know, do share on to your friends. Titanfall is certainly shaping up to be a fantastic
title
but with some rough edges that are going to have to be fixed before launch if they want
this game
to be considered an absolute groundbreaking AAA title.
Get that frame rate fixed on the Xbox One and I think they've got a winner. Thanks for
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