Post Thoughts: Titanfall 2... (Part 2)

In the game as-designed, the space fold weapon has blown up this planet's moon. This is such a crazy and dangerous thing to do to the planet you are on... I have to believe that the writers/designers have no idea how this type of event would affect the planet.

While I do think Titanfall 2 is a very flawed game, I don't think it's a write-off. There are many good elements that can be used and tweaked to improve both the story and gameplay. For my thoughts on the game, see Part 1. Now, onto how I'd "fix" the game...




Backseat designing:

Apparently, in the CoD-inspired future universe, UI is reduced to projected heads-up displays and knife hacking tools. In fact, I wish to return this knife hacking tool to whomever thought it up... I actually think it could have been a really cool segment if they'd have expanded upon this "flight" gameplay. It certainly had the chance to be more interesting than the titan combat sections....

"Oooh boy..." - Dr. Sam Beckett

I kind of don't even know where to start with this game.... Okay, let's go with mechanics first. One of the biggest problems I had with Titanfall 2 was the lack of focus. It appeared that the developers came up with loads of cool ideas and then just couldn't bring themselves to cut those ideas down into a coherent game "style". This is why we get Legacy of Kain-style world shifting in one level, Portal-esque platforming in another (okay, no portals but I can't remember a game where there was geometry shifting), Mirror's Edge-style high-up acrobatics and combat in one, armoured tank combat in several others and even a brief section where you pilot a "plane"!

So, having gone to all the trouble to put all these mechanics into code, we've not seen them implemented again in Respawn Entertainment's follow-up games (we've got Jedi: Fallen Order and Apex Legends) so these code segments are just sitting there, unused... wasted.

Combat:

At the basic level the game is about Titans and titan combat so you can't really remove them otherwise you've removed the titular element of the game. However, what I would do is FIX titan combat. As it stands, titans move very slowly and do not control well when moving over uneven terrain - one of the reasons the fight with Viper was so difficult for me is that BT-7274 struggles to traverse the flat to angled sides of the ship so it's difficult to position and dodge. On the other side of things, the weapon loadouts do not balance with each other or with particular playstyles and on the third edge, the titan health system doesn't really make any sense and doesn't work in terms of the slow movement and unbalanced weapons systems. Finally, at the fouth angle, combat itself is very unsatisfying because there's little impact on any particular titan for most abilities or ammunition interactions and melee is nowhere near as cool as that observed in the opening cinematic.

Contrast this with the pilot cinematic and what you get to do in game: the pilot can wall run, jump, slide, switch weapons, enable special abilities, get into a Titan and mount titans to help destroy them, etc. I think that the promise held in that opening cinematic is largely fulfilled within the confines of a non-scripted player-driven game.

So how would I fix this?

I think that we need to decide whether titans are slow and heavy and almost invulnerable tanks or light, agile and more vulnerable (but less vulnerable than the pilot). In terms of damage taken, the pilot is already quite fragile but, due to the infinitely regenerating health pool, can take a lot of damage without being killed. The titans, on the other hand are vulnerable to pistol and SMG shots from the foot soldiers. This should not be a thing!! Nothing is worse than realising that you're losing base armour AND your shield is not recharging when you're hiding from a titan because you didn't notice that pissant little mook hiding away over there in a corner and, quite frankly, the titan weapons are not really designed for taking out infantry...

First change: Don't let small arms do damage to a titan.

Secondly, having to stop combat to find a battery (which usually only provides a minimal amount of health) whilst being fired upon by virtually all enemies in an area and where there is no cover is really unsatisfying and once you're in that position, you're usually about to blow up anyway. Also, mechanically, it makes no sense for a battery to recharge the hull points...

Keep the armour/health pool of the titans the same but make it ALL regenerating health. Just have the armour regenerate slower than the shields.

Fine, have it be nano-technology or some other space-magic but don't have your titan be weaker and more situationally vulverable than the pilot. It's just stupid.

My preference would also be for the weapon loadouts to affect the style of titan gameplay: A machine gun cannon? Faster movement, a rocket launcher that requires a lock-on or a railgun that requires charging? Slower movement. However, I think that the loadouts should be more flexible. Why, if my playstyle prefers the vortex shield do I have to unequip it in order to use the VTOL hover and/or the tracker rockets? These are three separate subsystems which don't really have any bearing on each other. Why does my weapon dictate the special abilities?

Make the titan loadouts collectible as they currently are but implment the loading on the titan as a slot system whereby the player chooses the weapon, the ordnance ability, defensive ability and the tactical ability. Have the core ability tied to the ordnance ability*.

*Currently, the only issue with this is the Ronin loadout which is heavily skewed to actually possessing the sword. All the other abilities are functionally independent from the other "slots". Maybe the answer is that the Ronin's defensive ability is increased speed... (thus the defensive slot could be chosen to be empty) and the core ability could be increased shield regeneration rate (to enable closing of distances to the enemy without taking as much damage).

Tie movement speed with weapon held (e.g. Quad Rocket is slowest, Tracker Cannon is highest).

Technically, I don't like the fact that you can switch titan loadouts on the fly in missions and combat - it implies that you're lugging around all this extra equipment and can also change them with no engineering time. However, in terms of gameplay I think this decision makes sense as it doesn't lock players into a particular loadout if they find it's not effective/fun.

Finally, we need to make the titan combat more visceral (Yeah, yeah. I know, "buzzword") by making the melee combat more reactive. 

Titans should be able to block incoming melee attacks, both melee and heavy weapons attacks should stagger the titan. It's ridiculous that a titan is as unaffected by a rocket strike or railgun round as it is a 40 mm cannon round.

The pilot gameplay is mostly fine. However, I would make one change - which is linked to the change in story structure below:

Have the pilot have a choice between the time travel device and the cloak.

The time travel device (TTD from now on) was very cool and should have been in more of the game. However, it took away the ability of the player to cloak. It would be good to switch between those two using the d-pad up/down buttons (which are unused in the campaign). Now, you can make the argument that having the TTD increases development time and, if the player doesn't use it, preferring the stealth device instead, then the developers wasted that extra time making two versions of each level. So, if I had my choice, I'd remove the stealth mechanic from the campaign and replace the TTD with that in the multiplayer. Personally, I found the cloak to be too limited to be of much use in the campaign.

I like how each weapon has a little pop-up detailing what it is when you switch to it. The weapon designs are cool but mostly indistinct from each other so this helps.

Integrate the story with the mechanics

The way the game is currently designed, the mechanics are completely divorced from the story and setting. The big buildup and time traversal mechanics in the second mission happen WAY too early in the game and are then not seen again. The whole game is about changing history through bold action: the rebellion against the IMC, the Fold weapon to destroy the rebellion and the last ditch attempt to save the rebel planet, Harmony. Yet, the time travel mechanics/alien artefacts only feature as a very small part of the game.

I felt like a badass during that mission and it was disappointing to go back to the normal playstyle later on. The game needs to build up to the time travel mechanics and then retain them for longer. This also has the effect on a possible sequel as well... Okay, that means that the story needs to be retooled in a major way but how about this plot summary as an example of what could have been:

The player and BT-7274 are stranded on the planet with little support after a disasterous attack in order to infiltrate and destroy a special weapons facility by the Frontier Militia*. After Lastimosa's death, the player and BT team up and head to the deep space network antenna to try and communicate with the main Militia fleet in orbit around the planet (or in system) and find that there's no one there. They've all been destroyed. 

BT finds this very strange given that there were no reports of an IMC fleet in the vicinity but accesses the facility's logs and discovers that a huge energy signature was recently detected from the region known to be home to the special weapons facility. BT notes that this is where Captain Lastimosa was meant to rendezvous with an undercover pilot in order to extract them and their collected data from the weapons facility before the main force landed but had been unable to complete this mission.

BT observes that the weapons facility is a long way off but that there's a shortcut through a tunnel network to the other side of the mountain range dividing the two facilities. The player goes through the underground training facility and out the other side to the special weapons facility to find it in good working order** and patrolled/guarded by the IMC. There's no sign of Anderson at the meeting place but BT's scans indicate that his signal is still weakly transmitting from a location deeper in the facility. The player traverses to this position only to find a weird temporal anomaly which is ebbing and flowing. All of a sudden it expands and consumes the player.

The player is transported to the past through the temporal anomaly. Lacking BT (as the titan does not travel through time with the player), the player locks onto Anderson's signal and finds him, dead - apparently killed in a struggle as he was discovered escaping. The player gains the timeshift device and is able to return to the present. However, BT recognises that the data collected by Anderson is not present in his helmet and so the player must traverse the facility in the past to recover it from a stash in the facility.

As the player progresses, they discover that the reason the Militia fleet was destroyed was because they were detected upon entering the local system by the facility and the  test scale version of the space fold weapon was used against the fleet - destroying them. This gives the player and BT the idea to sabotage the weapon as it's charging up to fire on the fleet. These actions result in the destruction of the facility to the point we find in the original game. The player then scans the Ark*** so that the larger version can be tracked from orbtial scans. 

BT notes that the duo should return to the deep space network antenna and transmit the recovered data back to their home system. The player still retains the time travel device but finds that the temporal effect weakens as they move further from the test site. Meaning that the length of time reversed through its activation lessens. 

Upon reaching the deep space network, the duo find it partially destroyed and locate an embattled troop of Militia fighters in the power plant. It turns out that the Militia fleet in orbit had bombarded the site in order to stop the IMC from issuing off-world comms for assisstance. However, the Militia at the power plant have been cut off from their supply lines in the battles after planetfall and want to make contact with the fleet in orbit. (The player character makes a remark about the fleet being destroyed but the Militia informs him that the fleet is still intact despite taking heavy losses engaging with the IMC defence fleet and ground-based batteries. The pilot realises that they were successful in altering history.

The pilot has to go into the power plant and recover an arc gun whilst platforming between present and past. Then has to go and retrieve the communcation device (I forgot what it's called) in a similar manner and then has to send the message to the Militia fleet in orbit in the present. They proceed to hook up with the Militia and stage the assault on the base where the Ark is located in the present - BT makes some comment about it not being there in the past and that an assault on the base alone is impossible - so time travel is not available in this mission.

The rest of the game happens as is currently designed. However, one small change - to make it so that Blisk takes the TTD from the pilot when he is captured, saying something to the effect of "that it looks like a valuable piece of kit that will make him some money on the black market".

*Note to self: think up a better name for this faction - it's too generic. Even "Colonial Militia" sounds better but I wouldn't use it because of Battlestar Galactica...

**It made no sense in the original story that the firing of the Ark destroyed the facility and caused all these temporal anomalies. The IMC would never commit to firing the main, full scale weapon knowing that they would all be killed and the facility destroyed after a single firing. That's not how militaries work - that would only work, thematically, if it was a last stand and they were about to be overrun by a superior force.

***Note to self, fire whoever thought calling an energy device an "Ark" was a good idea... names have meanings and, usually, writers choose the names of things from antiquity in order to reflect the attributes people most closely associate with those names with the current item/person. For example: Morpheus in The Matrix is named after a greek god associated with sleep and dreams. His role in the film is to appear to Neo in the dreaming world (aka the matrix), wake Neo up and guide him between the waking world and the dreaming world.

One of the nice things with this type of plot is that we have several hooks for a potential sequel without having the "Star Wars" problem of needing bigger and badder enemies and world-destroying problems. We now have three hooks:

1. BT is still present in some form in the pilot's helmet, potentially even lost in time*.
2. Blisk has the alien artefact. 
3. The pilot has Blisk's calling card/invitation to join the Apex Predators (well, that's the summary of the scene but I'm not certain that was necessarily the implication of his little speech).
4. The IMC main fleet is still, as far as we know, on their way to aid their now severely depleted forces on the frontier worlds.

*He was at the centre of an explosion on a larger device which cause time fractures during the explosion of a smaller device, after all...

These can all be worked into a satisfying plot for a Titanfall 3 where hunting down Blisk, recovering the device and racing against time to prepare for the arrival of the IMC forces play a pivotal role. You could even have the pilot go AWOL from the Frontier Militia forces in order to recover BT from a rip in time (or something).

Of course, there is one huge issue with the titan concept as presented in Titanfall 2 that I can't really get around - there's a real confusion as to what makes a titan unique and what made BT-7274 unique. Titans are produced in a factory - they will all be installed with the same data/personality and programming. Sure, individual data on missions would be temporarily unique but good AI researchers would make sure that data was shared once back in a base or something so that all AI can be improved from each individual's experiences. So, the writers really sort of messed up the concept of what it means to be BT-7274... though it did make for a good emotional story for us meatbag humans to enjoy.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like a Titanfall 3 will happen any time soon since the studio is probably very busy supporting their "battle royale" game, Apex Legends (also based in the Titanfall universe).


There is one final change I would like to make to the story - Remove the mercenary titan squads.

Seriously, I mentioned this in Part 1 but it just doesn't make any sense for a merc squad to own private, let alone heavily custom titans. I didn't remove them from my changes to the plot above because I was trying to limit those changes in order to make the themes of the game fit the actual gameplay and story better and they don't really impact those aspects but it's a really ugly kludge to have a mercenary titan squad - especially since they are working within the IMC as opposed to being the main force working for the IMC.

Look at mercenaries in real life - they're either small outfits that provide personal security or they're huge enterprises with lots of money behind them, taking on large deployments. The Apex Predators (the merc squad in this game) are the size of a small outfit with the funding of a huge enterprise. It doesn't fit. Mercs do not have the state of the art equipment that militaries do - it doesn't happen because nations pour billions of *insert currency here* into the development of new weapons and interlinking systems. Merc outfits buy generic, off-the-shelf equipment.

Anyway, so that's my reimagining of the game as it stands. I hope you enjoyed this little indulgence. Let me know what you think.