Titanfall is almost ready for launch – a vessel designed by expert craftsmen with countless noteworthy praises of its build quality. Many say it is the finest Xbox One game ever built. With many passengers having already pre-ordered access for the maiden voyage in March, some fear that the heavy weight of expectation may be too much for such a Titantic title to live up to.
I had a chance to chat to one of the crew charged with steering this ship through the murky waters ahead. She did a good job of convincing me that Titanfall will be too big to sink.
On Valentine’s Day, the Titanfall Beta successfully swept many Xbox One and PC gamers off their feet. A week before that, I caught up with Abbie Heppe of Respawn Entertainment to talk about the Beta build and discuss what it is like to get a community to fall in love with a gaming franchise before it exists.
Spawning A Community
I asked Abbie to talk about her role with Respawn; “I’ve been at the studio for a little over 3 years, almost from the beginning, and my job is to interface with all of you, to interface with press, public. I’m sort of our internal hub for communications. So a lot of my job is talking to the dev team, finding out what all of them do. It’s almost like interviewing people internally. But making sure I know what I’m talking about and can tell the story of the game.”
I commented that it must have been quite exciting to get the game in front of people’s faces because it must be odd to be a community manager for a new company when the community doesn’t exist yet; “Yeah! I was there for about two years before we were actually talking about the game, so it’s a very strange time. You find different things to do, but it’s not like having a fully announced game you can talk about and be proud of. So yeah, that was fun.
For the last few months, it’s been all about going on the road and showing people the game for the first time. It’s really an interesting experience, because I play with all these people at work who are super experienced, play the game all the time, know exactly what they’re doing, and I notice that immediately when people start playing the game they fall into these habits of-, they’ll duck behind cover and they’ll pop out and they’ll shoot one of the AI guys and then get back behind cover.
When you watch us start to play the game we’re immediately running everywhere, trying to get across to the other side of the map as quickly as possible, trying to chain together our wallruns like crazy, and you really have to break some of your FPS habits, and I see Titanfall as this equaliser of, ‘We’re all gonna have to learn new skills.’”
Beta Building
Abbie was quick to point out how much had changed from previous versions, like the build we had played at last year’s Eurogamer Expo; “We’ve made a lot of changes since then. we’ve made a lot of changes since the first things that we’ve shown at E3, and some of it’s really subtle.
The HUD has changed a lot. All the weapons have been tweaked and balanced, and so this is one of the maps that we showed at Eurogamer, but there’s also another map. It’s also got a new mode in it, and it also has burn cards which is something new that we’re showing here tonight.
So it’s a little bit of a slice because we want to give the gamers a taste of the game and get to play what you guys really enjoyed playing at Eurogamer before launch so that, [we can] show them the experience that everybody else has been having and talking about on Twitter and Facebook.”
I asked about the upgrades available in the Beta; “I think there are some new weapons and abilities in this. There’s also some stuff that we were showing in earlier builds that aren’t in this one that are still in the final game. They’re still in the final game, but you know, when we do builds for these shows, we’re giving people a taste because obviously when the game comes out we want gamers to discover a lot of stuff on their own.
We want them to have that first experience playing a map that they’ve never seen before. We want them to get through all the progression and find out exactly how long they can play the game. Some of that stuff is so inconsequential to what the actual core of the game is, and we love fans, and we want them to just be able to discover some of that organically.”
I asked if there was a temptation to just show everything from the final game without having to hold bits back; “Oh yeah, totally. I mean I go from playing the full game to playing the beta and playing these little cross-sections that we do to show people, and I end up playing up and going, ‘Oh my god, I just want to be back playing the full game.’ It’s tough to go one to the other. But at the same time, I’ve gotten really good at Angel City.”
I then asked about one of the most interesting features of the behind the scenes functionality of Titanfall with the ability to make adjustments and balances to the game without interrupting gaming time by taking down severs or the need for downloading patches; “Basically, it’s a much more fluid updating system, and we are able to make changes without bringing the game down. Some of that stuff I think was information that we addressed after the alpha, but yeah, our goal is to make things, updates and all of that, as smooth for gamers as possible.”
Game Modes
We talked through the three game modes on display in the Beta;
Attrition
I asked if Attrition was just Titanfall’s equivalent of a Death Match; “Sort of, but it’s not just killing Pilots. I get your point. You can kill the AI, you can kill Titans, everything will build your score, so even if you’re not the best player in the world, you can go kill tons of the AI in the game and still feel like you were super-accomplished and you really are helping your team, and you’re an important part of that.”
Hardpoint Domination
I asked if this was Titanfall’s take on King of the Hill but commented that I had already found some interesting Titan related tactics; ” We give you options. There are some people that, when they have their Titan, they ‘re going to want to be in it and do crazy stuff, but a lot of those capture points require you to get out of your Titan to capture them, so it works to set your Titan to guard and say, ‘Hey, watch this point, keep anybody from coming in in this direction while I cap this point, while I take this.’
The other thing that’s really helpful for those, and most people won’t have figured out yet, if you hold Left Trigger you can hang on the walls. My style, when I play Hardpoint, this is one of those things that when I played in our Alpha I knew how to do and nobody else did, now everybody knows how to do, probably because I tell them on things like this.
Also because they see people doing it, and that’s part of the learning of Titanfall is, you see somebody do something and you’re like, ‘How do I do that? I want to do that.’ So you can hang on a wall, so I’ll do that then go invisible, and then somebody drops, I drop down behind them, and I’m like, ‘Gotcha.’”
Last Titan Standing
I noted that it was a bad idea to get caught on your own in Last Titan Standing; “What that mode teaches you to do is how to stay alive as a Titan, because being a Titan isn’t just going crazy and shooting other people.
The designers have actually put a lot of depth into it, and with all the abilities and skills that you get as that-, like I spend a lot of time-, my shields go down, I get behind a building, I cover, I throw a smoke so that I’m concealed. I then flank from the left-hand side because they think I’m over here.
It’s partially the mobility of the Titans that allows you to do that, but it’s also all the weaponry. As soon as you get the quad rocket, you can sort of space people out from you and push them away, so you have time to get away, recharge your shields, call in your friends for support to flank from the side.
So really Last Titan Standing incentivizes players to stay alive for a while as a Titan and really think about how they’re playing and how they’re attacking other Titans.”
Magic Burn Cards
I asked Abbie to describe how the Burn Card system worked and how often we would see them unlocking in the final game; “As you accomplish things in the game you’ll earn burn cards, and the nice thing about burn cards is, unlike something you would get for having a killstreak, they’re accessible to everyone.
[If] you escape on the dropship, you’ll get a burn card for that. There’s different rarities to them and there are different capabilities. We’re only giving you a small taste of them [in the Beta].
They’re a one-time-use card, so you get a bunch of them. You have three slots, so when you’re in a match you can say, ‘Oh man, that round was really bad for me, I want to use the Amped 101, because I’ll have an advantage with that, and you get it for one life. If somebody kills you, you lose it, but at the same time, it can be really helpful for that one life. It’s not just meant for the best players in the game, it’s for everyone, so you’re not giving out an unfair advantage.”
I asked for more details on the type of powers the Burn Cards enabled; “So, some of the examples that I can give, some of the ones we have in here, an Amped 101 and a couple more powerful versions of weapons that are in the game, some of them which we haven’t even shown yet, so looking through the burn cards in there is a good way to find out some of the things we haven’t told you yet.
Also, some of them, it’ll be an ability, like you’ll move faster for that one life. It could be something like, you’ll be able to call in your Titan faster, so you’ll be the first one to drop it in, which gives you an advantage, especially if you’re a newer player. What a nice thing, to have that sooner.”
“I do like some of the text on the cards. On one of the ones that says you can move fast, it says ‘We’ll start this [procedure] by removing your legs’.”
“Can you tell that many of our designers like Magic cards?”
“Ah yes, I think so, that comes through.”
“We have a pretty healthy Magic community at the office.”
“Well, I think you have a pretty magic game on your hands.”
“Oh, we’re doing puns! That was really good, that was well played. I like that. That was good.”
“I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on the final game.”
“I’m very much looking forward to everyone getting their hands on the final game.”
“Yes, well I guess you really want to see the reaction.”
“I just wanna play with people! Nobody is more excited to get the game out there than us.”
“Then you don’t have to worry about the secrets.”
“Nope, I can just say, ‘Go play the game.’”
———————–
And you will be able to go and play the game from March 11th (US) and March 14th (UK). If you can’t wait that long you can burn through some more time waiting for the launch by reading an upcoming article based on more discussion from this interview on Abbie’s thoughts on how Titanfall is evolving the First Person Shooter.
You can also check out BRB’s previous Titanfall coverage and there will be plenty of discussions on upcoming BRB podcasts.
Tags: Abbie Heppe, PC, Respawn Entertainment, Titanfall, Titanfall Beta, Titanicfall, Xbox 360, Xbox One
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