Fast-paced Titanfall keeps it fresh

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      Respawn Entertainment is not Infinity Ward. And Respawn’s first game, Titanfall, isn’t anything like Infinity Ward’s first game, 2003’s Call of Duty. But the two games are inextricably linked.

      The founders of Respawn, Jason West and Vince Zampella, were also founders (with Grant Collier) of Infinity Ward. West and Zampella left Infinity Ward in 2010—their departure sparked a protracted, public battle against Activision, which owns the studio—to form Respawn. West left Respawn in March 2013.

      According to Justin Hendry, about half of Respawn’s staff worked at Infinity Ward. But the lead designer of Titanfall, which came out on March 11, doesn’t seem that interested in the storied history of the studio, based in Sherman Oaks, California.

      “I came here to work with these guys because I consider them the best at what they do,” Hendry told the Georgia Straight.

      While Hendry had worked on God of War 3 while at Sony Santa Monica, he’d never helped develop a first-person shooter, and he assumed that was what Respawn would be creating.

      “I actually took the job not knowing what the game was,” Hendry admitted. “I just knew that these guys were extremely talented and I wanted to learn from them.”

      Titanfall, a Microsoft exclusive with versions for Windows and Xbox One (the Xbox 360 edition comes out March 25), is a first-person shooter and a multiplayer game; there is no single-player mode. In an interview at a February press event in Los Angeles, Hendry said the goal was to “make something new, make something different, make something fresh, make something fun.”

      The game is unique, according to Hendry, because it’s unpredictable. Players enter combat on the surface of a planet as a “pilot” but can call for a “titan” to be dropped from space for them to enter and use. Combat situations, then, can take on a number of configurations: pilots fighting each other, pilots versus titans, and titans fighting other titans.

      Pilots are fast and agile. They can run along walls and, with the aid of jet packs, can leap up the sides of buildings. Hendry said the pilots’ speed and freedom of movement are unlike anything that’s been seen before in a first-person shooter.

      As for the titans, in any other game, they would be “mechs”—giant weaponized suits of armour. In Titanfall, things are different. Hendry said that where mechs are slow and complicated to manoeuvre, titans are meant to be similar to pilots.

      “It was a very conscious decision to make it so there’s not a learning curve for players,” he explained. “We wanted them to be fast, and we wanted the fights to be strategic.”

      Titans can dash to avoid attacks and are equipped with energy shields and heavy weapons. But they can’t jump, which posed a challenge to the game’s designers, who had to come up with levels that would balance out the strengths and limitations of the pilots and the titans.

      “You want to make sure that they’re intersecting at certain points,” said Hendry, adding that everyone working on the project learned from the experience of creating the game’s maps. “You want to make sure that the pilot can’t just hide in an area forever and never be exposed to a threat from a titan. You want to make sure a titan can’t just fire blindly into every hole and kill everything.”

      The key, Hendry said, was playing the game repeatedly and making small changes to ensure it was balanced and fun for everyone. He said that even after weeks of testing, the developers at Respawn were finding new techniques and strategies emerging from the sandbox. And he anticipates that the game will need to be adjusted after release.

      “It’s impossible to say you tuned the game perfectly when you have a small sample size of people that you’re looking at,” Hendry admitted. He expects that highly skilled players will find “exploits” that will “break” the game. “We’re going to have to fix it. And we will.”

      Smooth moves

      Hendry has three manoeuvres he likes to do when playing the first-person multiplayer shooter.

      First, shutting down an auto-titan: “If you jump on a titan that doesn’t have a pilot in it, you can call down a titanfall on your position and it will crush the enemy titan instantly.”

      Secondly, wall running: “As a pilot, moving back and forth and using the smart pistol to lock onto grunts below.”

      Finally, vortexing, a titan ability that allows them to “collect” ammunition and ordnance in an energy vortex: “You can never go wrong with vortexing a bunch of shit and firing it back at the guy who was trying to kill you.”

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