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S2 Ep119: Titanfall 2
79 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they yell at each other to get into the mecha in this week's episode!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Weekend vs Weekday Routines
00:00:00
Speaker
you
00:00:28
Speaker
It's on the way. Standby for Titanfall. Transferring control to pilot.
00:00:52
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going today, Dave? I was going to possibly correct you on the tonight thing.
00:01:05
Speaker
Things are going all right. Having a bit of a lazy Saturday here. I mean, Thursday. Yeah. Thursday morning, middle of the work day. UPM. Nobody knows.
Sleeping Patterns and Cultural Views on Sleep
00:01:19
Speaker
But yeah, I think you're going pretty laid back. How about yourself?
00:01:23
Speaker
It's pretty nice. I'm always, I think it's maybe a mark that I'm a lazy person, but I enjoy when I can sleep in and just like sleep until I just naturally wake up instead of as opposed to an alarm clock. Wait, how much sleep do you actually need? I think I prefer if I'm just going to like
00:01:46
Speaker
be tired, go to bed and wake up. I'll probably sleep like nine hours, but obviously I never sleep that long during the week. I usually get like six and a half. Um, so that's probably why I sleep so much on the weekends. Actually, probably it's just like fine. Rest. Yeah. I do feel some of that. I'm probably averaging like seven ish. Hmm.
00:02:14
Speaker
I probably could do eight, but that means that I have to go to bed before midnight night. Why? Why would I do that? I can't, I can't go to bed before midnight. I'll just wake up at like 5 AM. It doesn't even matter how much sleep I've gotten at that point. I slept in until like nine 30 today. That's because I stayed up to like 1 AM, but then I like checked my phone and like, but then I felt bad that I woke up.
00:02:42
Speaker
at 930 because I'm like, well, this is going to offset your lunchtime and then like it's the weekend. Nobody gives a shit. Right. What'd the voice in the mirror say back to you? It's an order grub hub. I was like, I will probably do that later. I think the eight hours thing it might be. So I'm not a sleep doctor.
00:03:05
Speaker
Full disclosure. But I don't feel like, I feel like eight hours seems pretty arbitrary because the, um, although everyone says eight hours, like sleep cycles, my understanding is sleep cycles occur in an hour and a half, like blocks. Um, so like, if you're going to use like sleepy time or whatever website to like tell you when to wake up based off of sleep cycles, so you won't be disoriented.
00:03:30
Speaker
it won't put you at eight hours ever because it's not in a hour and a half block like so like nine is three is four and a half is sixes but seven and a half if we're hitting all the walls of all of them but then eight's not
00:03:54
Speaker
And I've kind of, I've always had that too. Like I'm never like, whew, a solid eight hours on the dot of sleep. I'm perfectly rested and ready to start my day.
Sleep Cycles Impact on Lifestyle and Routines
00:04:03
Speaker
I think for a while I was doing six and a half or seven back when we worked together. And that was like part of my cycle. It was just fine. I slept to this amount and I had like a solid bedtime, got up.
00:04:20
Speaker
Get ready for work, dig around a little bit, did work stuff, came home, exercise, showered, cooked food, and then stayed until bedtime and then repeated. Not a good system for a bit. My body seemed regulated, I guess, almost.
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah. It's different. It's different sleeping on weekend compared to the week. I have some passive tiredness during the week, obviously, because I'm not getting enough sleep. But I'm used to operating under that amount of sleep. I don't know. I'm sure that it's not the best approach. But you know. The whole reason I asked in the first place is because I know when you got up,
00:05:04
Speaker
Which means you probably stayed up pretty late for needing that amount of hours of sleep. Yeah, it was like six a.m. or something. If the sun's coming up, I mean, I did that maybe four or five years back where I could pull it off. But now I just either like grumbly just kind of keep staying awake at that point. Because I have fears of like fucking out my sleep cycle.
00:05:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I have realized I had fears of messing up my sleep cycle. And then I realized the fears and then I embodied the fears. Now I am the fear. I try to normalize a little bit more on Sunday and advance for the week. But it is the free day. I have to get up. Oh, no. I wish I knew this was coming.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's it's it's definitely something I find that I can't I can't like completely deprive myself like I used to in college, though. I have got like I'm going to call it like old man. Like grumpiness, if I'm just completely deprived of sleep, I can't do it like I could when I was younger.
00:06:19
Speaker
Well, you don't have as much bounce back energy for sure. Yeah. And also I know you weren't the type and aren't the type, but back in the day where we used to like stay up late and drink, uh, your body's like, I need to detox and rest and stuff. We're just like, nah, we'll get up, you know, early and then go to like a diner and like drink again. And it was just like a terrible fucking cycle. But you were young enough where your body's like, I don't know. It's.
00:06:47
Speaker
I mean, we'll deal with it later, but no, right now it's fine. Cool. Yeah, staying up late and waking up for classes is...
Podcast Format and Content Creation Insights
00:06:57
Speaker
I don't think I would approach this the same way now that I'm a few years older. I don't know. It's crazy stuff, though. So anyways, Titanfall 2 is a video game. Sometimes we talk about games. It's not the main focus of the podcast, obviously.
00:07:16
Speaker
It's really just for Jake and I to talk and he's like, I'll only talk to you if we record it. I'm like, okay. Right. Otherwise we're wasting content, which is up there on our tablet. Unforgivable sense. Oddly enough, like we said, this episode isn't
00:07:33
Speaker
None of these episodes have been scripted for a long time, but they kind of are in the sense of we're just rereading the Discord logs. Even this message right now to you, this awkwardly worded thing, is all typed in Discord, and I'm reading it in real time.
00:07:47
Speaker
It makes it much easier to plan our responses when we've already written out our responses.
Social Media Content Control and Censorship
00:07:54
Speaker
People may have noticed, compared to our early episodes, our timing is usually a little bit better as far as responding to each other. It's because we're just reading from a script. This is all scripted.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yes, this is all scripted. I try to get on a good pause there. There's in brackets, reaffirm it's scripted. I want to be, I think it'd be great if
00:08:22
Speaker
Like, let's say I said something heinous to you in Discord, and you had like a what? I can't believe you would say that, but I went back and edited it. So I think puppies are really cute and adorable. And you're like, what? How could you say that? That would be hilarious. That's kind of the everything before you record. There was a
00:08:42
Speaker
So Facebook's dumb, right? Thanks for people who follow us on Facebook. But it's really dumb. And I know that forever they've had the ability to delete comments off of your own posts.
00:08:55
Speaker
But then people talk about really controversial topics sometimes. And it's just like, oh, if there's like a back and forth,
Introduction to Titanfall 2: Development and Gameplay
00:09:02
Speaker
someone could legitimately do that. Just delete all of their own comments. Or a friend could delete their comments if they're the owner of the post. And kind of just leave this one-sided schizophrenic conversation. I mean, you can only do that so many times, I guess, before people would catch on.
00:09:36
Speaker
It seems to be. So this is a, excuse me, developed by Respawn, which are like, owned by EA, published by EA, came out in 2016, which is a year. Not as bad as this year. That's something. It's weird when you can say that the current year is worse than EA. Yeah. First person shooter, sci-fi.
00:09:48
Speaker
I have no point to this. It was just an observation.
00:10:06
Speaker
some sort of fit this sci-fi first-person shooter, single-player campaign, multiplayer co-op options. I would say that it's probably the spiritual successor to Titanfall 1.
Impressions of Titanfall 2's Campaign and Multiplayer
00:10:22
Speaker
Having not played Titanfall 1, I can't confirm or deny it, but I'll trust you on this. As it is the sequel.
00:10:34
Speaker
This is something I got to very late in that within the last couple weeks, I finally got around to playing some. Is this something that you got from me on Origin? I probably did at one point. I can't remember exactly. Did you have it on Origin or on Steam? It was on Steam, but you still have to launch through Origin because EA sucks a huge pile of dicks. It's kind of their DRM thing. I mean, obviously, I dislike Origin as well for similar reasons.
00:11:05
Speaker
For the listeners who may have used it in the past, it seems a little less bad now because Origin closes as soon as you close Titanfall 2 if you launch it through Steam, which is nice. But yeah, I mean, it is still just another layer of DRM and game management. So yeah, but... As far as like a game, a focus game, I did enjoy a lot of
00:11:33
Speaker
playing it and the actual gun playing mechanics within it. But for possibly how late I joined in and the experiences that I had, not coming in fresh with like the multiplayer and everything, it felt overall underwhelming. Because everyone was like talking mad shit about like, yo, dude, it's got the best campaign ever for an FPS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Impact of Hype on Game Perception
00:11:58
Speaker
But for me, it felt very trite and very AAA.
00:12:03
Speaker
It had a lot of good points to it as well, but there was definitely a disparity between what everyone was hyping about recommending versus my personal experience.
00:12:15
Speaker
Yeah, I would like to actually just take a side tangent off of that. All right, let's go off recording. What's up? Yeah, right. All right, let's pause the recording. All right, recording's paused. I actually get that entirely. Like, I probably was completely guilty of being one of the people to over-hype this or to hype this. But I wonder if there's few things as destructive to a game as hype.
00:12:44
Speaker
And this obviously isn't like...
00:12:48
Speaker
the making of games hype episode. But as an aside, I feel like this would be the type of game to enjoy more if you came into it with a neutral perspective, as opposed to being like, once I play this FPS, no other FPS is going to do it for me, right? Like, I've definitely had games friends were like, really, really play this, it's great. And then I get in there, I'm like, I'm not really in the mood. I drop out and feel real disappointed.
00:13:17
Speaker
Do you think this could be an instance of something like that where the game would have been better evaluated in neutral or?
Titanfall 2 Gameplay Mechanics and Player Mobility
00:13:27
Speaker
Is it just people are crazy and Some of it would have been if it's evaluated in neutral as you said, but the other part of it was
00:13:36
Speaker
not playing on the ground floor, because campaigns are campaigns. It's not really FPS campaigns. I look back and I'm like, oh man, remember level 17? That was the shit. It's usually, I was doing this in multiplayer with friends and I had a really good time. And the bullshittery or killstreaks you got during those times.
00:13:55
Speaker
right and i get that i think um to focus in on the campaign for a second i i did replay the campaign and prep for this you know make sure that my opinions were fresh and i can concede that most of the campaign uh and this is this verbatim reading what i had here is a mostly sci-fi war shooty game
00:14:22
Speaker
There's moments of I think exemplary design and gameplay in there and more than just affecting cause which we can talk about but
00:14:34
Speaker
between those kind of high octane, intense moments, the game doesn't have a whole lot other than like corridor shooty either in a Titan or as a pilot in the single player.
00:14:52
Speaker
And it was, I think part of the reasoning for this is this is back when, I mean, we still live in this age where the single player component of a mostly multiplayer game is a mandatory inclusion, but it's not where. For people who don't have internet. I mean, people still do it. People played the Halo campaign. People played the Call of Duty campaign.
00:15:15
Speaker
People who don't have internet, yeah. I think more people did. So I know one friend in particular who plays through four of the campaigns. I won't name him so he can't be doxed. And also so I don't have to back up my claim. Easy as pie. But I think that I think multiplayer is where the focus was.
00:15:44
Speaker
Oh, for sure. Because one of the biggest joys of playing in FPS, besides shooting other people on screen, and you'll notice everybody does it, is if you have some type of dash or jump, any time I'm doing something idle in the game, whether it be Titanfall 2, Halo, Destiny, kind of blank on some others, there's always kind of like an idle moving around, dashing and jumping. And this game really facilitates that because
00:16:12
Speaker
You can slide off services for momentum. You can wall run on stuff for wall slide. And so you're given so many mobility options that always feels like fast paced gameplay, even if you have like somewhat downtime.
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think the way they implemented it that makes it feel so good is the closest thing the movement feels to is actually a mirror's edge because they have acceleration whenever you're doing a mobility action. So if you slide, you move faster than if you were to run. If you wall run, you move faster than if you were to run. So training some of those actions feels real good.
00:16:53
Speaker
It would actually kind of suck if it was the other way. It's like a wall running. It's not, you're actually just wall walking. It looks really weird for everybody else.
Comparative Analysis of Titanfall 2's Movement Mechanics
00:17:00
Speaker
Like to contrast to a game where I think the pacing stays the same, I'm pretty sure, I could be wrong, but to my recollection, Prince of Persia has like, some of those games had wall running, but you moved at the exact same pace as your standard movement speed. So then it's just, oh, I'm just traversing the environment. This is just how I get from A to B. Yeah. But Titanfall's like,
00:17:23
Speaker
go and you just are running away from something very dangerous or jumping into the middle of all of these enemies from a high altitude. They stole the near fall damage immunity from Portal, the long fall boots, and the pilot jump kit. So you don't have to worry about falling from a great height. You can just go. It feels weird when games have to play.
00:17:52
Speaker
have the giant fall and you're like and time the last jump okay yeah i didn't break my shins we're okay yeah there's there's i remember there was a sequence in the main story where you have to fall like it's hundreds of feet like a really crazy distance and your um titan reassures you that your kit can take the fall and that's basically the campaign's kind of just training you for multiplayer in a lot of ways
00:18:19
Speaker
Um, that's your like, Hey, there's no fall damage because we didn't put fall damage in the game. We thought it wouldn't be fun. Yeah. I think anytime you have a degree of platforming, you shouldn't have fall damage because it doesn't make sense. Like your whole thing is to move around and get used to the movement and explore the area. But you're always worried about falling. You're like, I don't know. My shins lower down. They have to jump back up. Let that be the only punishment, you know?
Pilot vs Titan Gameplay Dynamics
00:18:48
Speaker
Yeah. I gotta say, it was a nice change of pace going back to mechanics of having that change in speed and pace. Something like Halo where it was, if you weren't in a vehicle, always static. You didn't have a dash, maybe in later Halo's you did, but it was just very slow and weighted, which is fine for what it was, but this feels much more
00:19:15
Speaker
Again, going back to like destiny, action oriented. Right. It's like, hey, you got to get behind cover. Hey, you got to go out because like now you have to like piece of damage on somebody. This is like your DPS phase going. We're just like positioning to something by mashing space bar in between shift.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah. Which is your interact with the environment run on walls button. Yeah. And double jump, right? Double jump out the gate. No, like unlock necessary for it. You don't need a scout customizable item. Like the pilot mode is designed to be obnoxiously fast. Pilot being out of the neck.
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And I was telling you about this earlier while we were playing, but I know in multiplayer, people get ridiculously good at running around outside of their titans. And even though titans, which we haven't really talked about, but they're giant mechs, even though they're incredibly lethal,
00:20:19
Speaker
They can kill a pilot with just a punch. You just use the punch button near a pilot and they'll die instantly. Pilots could be tremendously more devastating because of how fast you can be in this game, how versatile with some of the tools and things like that. I know you were using the grapple as a pilot for a while.
00:20:43
Speaker
Yeah, it was just another cute little layer of mobility. Because sometimes I wanted to jump on top of a silo, and I couldn't realistically jump or slide my way up there unless it was... I took my time, I was very patient at a certain spot, but usually stuff's going on, you have to shoot things, things are trying to shoot you. So it's a nice little option to be like, I need to get up there, wearing a speed boot, trying to swing a little bit around a corner, you can fuck around with the grappling hook.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's class specific. So I'm not sure if I was a scout class that had that. Yeah, I think so the way it works similar to the Call of Duty unlocks. So this was in particular in our like co-op gameplay frontier defense.
00:21:27
Speaker
In the campaign, you're only tactical option, not only tactical option, but for most of the game it's cloak, which is just similar to crisis. You go invisible for a bit, you use an action, you make an attack, you assassinate somebody and you come out of cloak.
00:21:45
Speaker
And co-op, the grapple I know can be used to grab two titans, grab the walls, all that stuff. But all of your classes you start with, when you are starting a multiplayer mode, are in CoD.
00:21:59
Speaker
the default classes. So it's just like, here's an assault class. Here's kind of something with an SMG. Here's something with a sniper. If you're a sniper, maybe you want cloak. And then as you level up your persistent profile, you get custom classes and the ability to modify them. So then you can just mix and match whatever you want at that point.
Pilot Abilities and Multiplayer Strategies
00:22:20
Speaker
So it's always good to have two. Again, comparing to Halo, where it was, again, earlier days.
00:22:26
Speaker
It was just like the weapons you could get in the game. Everyone started out level playing field. You don't really have abilities. Whereas in Call of Duty, like you're specifically going for, oh, I'm going to be a running gunning with like two SMGs, maybe more camping sniper or something in between. And it was nice to change it up for if you were feeling a given place out at that time. Right. And I think for the multiplayer for Titanfall 2, you could actually, I think you said swamp in between.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, so at any point between lives, you could switch your loadout, which could be really useful depending on what the enemies are running. We mentioned some of the tacticals already, the cloak, which was kind of just, from a game design perspective, it's nice and single player too, because it's like, oh, I found myself, I was playing in normal difficulty, and I still died a couple times, because you still die pretty fast if you're just in the open.
00:23:23
Speaker
But Cloak is the catch-all solution to that. It's like for the mechanic of, I need to run into cover and hide to regain my health, stop and pop definitive mechanic of shooters. Cloak is kind of just a get out of jail free card every like 20 seconds or something. You're like, I am now in cover.
00:23:44
Speaker
i no longer exist the enemies will not shoot me and they forgot that i'm here you know we're something close to it um yeah it's a cheap and easy way especially if you're like oh you're pinned down behind a pillar you can say i'm still here but you're not actually
00:24:02
Speaker
because you've moved in stealth and they don't really have a way to detect you outside of vision. Yeah, the AI is much, I don't think it ever tracks you while you're cloaked. We didn't play PvP to test this out, but I recall that in multiplayer, you can see a visual aberration, distortion, if a cloaked player is moving. So you can see them relatively easily if you're a pilot.
00:24:32
Speaker
if you're in your Titan, the visual sensors are less attuned or easy to tell against cloaked people. So they're basically invisible. So there's actually an incentive if the opposing team is using a bunch of cloak, maybe keep an eye out in pilot mode so that they're not jumping all over your Titans and stuff.
00:24:54
Speaker
But that was one option. Cloak was one option. We talked about the grapple already. Great mobility and movement. I like STEM, which is just like a quick little burst heal. And then you go real fast. It's just every time I hit the button in my head, the sonic music kicks in for a second. And everything you do is just real fast. You all run real fast. You run real fast for like a quick burst. And it's just fun.
00:25:24
Speaker
Would that be comparable to Starcraft STEM packs for Marines? Yeah, I would nerd out on one specific point. It heals you instead of damaging. Exactly. You can get a campaign upgrade for STEM that makes it so it actually heals instead of damages, but it doesn't work that way in multiplayer.
Multiplayer Complexity and Strategic Depth
00:25:45
Speaker
But it's exactly the same as the campaign upgrade, so I like that corollary. I wish I would have played around with that,
00:25:52
Speaker
I feel that my FPS skills are average enough, but it's nice to have them enhanced because I have decent enough tracking for shooting things. So just to bump that DPS is really what I would need. I don't need utility as much. I'll try and not get hit by stuff, but to be able to, when I again use the term P damage, the P damage on something feels really good.
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah. And it doesn't it doesn't necessarily increase. It doesn't like make your gun shoot faster. But you you move real fast. Yeah. It's not an overdrive for you. Yeah. Unfortunately, there are there are some other cool things. One is it's called a wall. It's basically a deployable, indestructible wall.
00:26:38
Speaker
and opponents have to shoot the base of the wall, the actual device in order to bring the wall down, but you can shoot through it. So it's kind of like a one-sided, it's Baptiste's ultimate sort of thing with a shield on it. And then there is some fun ones. One was Hollow Pilot, which just sends out a decoy.
00:27:00
Speaker
of yourself basically running forward while you gain like a really short cloak. So you can just be like fake me and then run around and like perform an execution on somebody who is confused, which is just like a melee kill animation. There's some cool ones, but I'm a sucker for melee kill animations. Yeah, I know you really like that on the Titans.
00:27:25
Speaker
Uh-huh. We'll get through it in like two seconds, but question for you, since you did multi-training at PVP, if you were going around and killing people in a campaign where you just press F to like punch or kick somebody to death with one blow, is that the same way you come across a pilot that's unsuspecting? You have to hold the button for a second to perform an execution instead of just moving a melee tech. Like a knife melee. It's a, you have to press and hold.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's the commit to the instant kill. Otherwise, you'll just do a melee attack, which does a lot of damage, but I don't think it's a guaranteed kill. You might have to do two or three then. Yeah, exactly. Because pilots have like a little bit more health. I could be wrong, but that's to my right of collection how it worked.
00:28:12
Speaker
And then these two last tacticals, one of them is phase shift, which is like functionally like a shorter duration cloak. But it's basically, I'm trying to think of, there's a lot of games that have a corollary like this. You phase out of existence for a second, you're on like a different plane. You can't be interacted with and you can't interact with things. You can still move and then after like a second or two, you just reappear back in the real plane.
00:28:41
Speaker
So you can use that to dodge a rocket, dodge a Titan punch, dodge a Titan nuclear explosion, reposition. You could set a satchel charge, phase shift, detonate the satchel charge, not kill yourself because you're not on the same plane, and then reappear. Stuff like that. Yes. Everything you described when you made comparisons to other games.
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like the rewind in vulnerability, but you can move wherever you want in it. But that has an execution associated with it where you phase shift into the person you're executing and just telefrag them, just pop. Of course. That's really strong actually. Yeah.
00:29:30
Speaker
Because obviously, like, if you're the person who's about to be telefragged, you see somebody disappear from existence, you don't know where they are, right? There's not a tell. There's no shimmer. No, you can see like a puff of where they vanish, but you don't see them once they're shifted for like a second or two. Yeah, that's concerning. That's real concerning. I mean, so they can't they don't get like a speed boost or anything. So they still have to close in on you.
00:29:58
Speaker
If they were behind you, they could have just shot you and you would have died or executed you. But yeah, it does work that way. It is kind of styling on them a little bit.
00:30:09
Speaker
But usually if you have that advantage on someone, you could have killed them anyways. Did you ever do the classic, like you went behind somebody who was sniping and then he sent them a messaging game, like? So as someone who mostly played PC games, I think I missed that because for full effect, it had to be like that Xbox classic messenger thing where you're like looking up their gamer tag.
Movement Controls and Player Experience in Titanfall 2
00:30:32
Speaker
You're typing it out with an Xbox controller, not like a plugged in fucking USB keyboard.
00:30:39
Speaker
I still remember that club where it's just like a right behind you or whatever. The guy like receives the message, pauses for a second, starts to slowly turn and then he killed him. That was freaking crazy. I don't get that much in PC. Also, this is for PC. It was for everything like back in the day, but we played on PC. It feels like a strong PC game.
00:31:07
Speaker
It's a shooter, so I'm always biased. I prefer on PC. Certain things can still be good on... I'd say probably Xbox. I feel like PlayStation has never really had the best control. I mean, it's still laid out the same way with dual analog, but it's always felt better with Xbox. Maybe as far as I grew up with Halo and Halo 2, and just the feel of the controller and the weight of it.
00:31:35
Speaker
I feel like PlayStation always limits itself more for fighters. Yeah. I can understand that. My input's kind of useless here because I was thinking about this when you mentioned Halo earlier, especially Halo 1, and the feel in these two games. Halo, you kind of control a little bit more like a tank, and this one, you're just super agile, running all over the place. Crazy time.
00:32:01
Speaker
But the original Halo was well optimized and designed. The controls were designed in such a way that it was great with an Xbox controller. Not only innovative from a gameplay design, back for the time, like the overshield, the start of regenerating health, which
00:32:22
Speaker
Although people were real pissed about it at the time, I think has overall been a much less obnoxious. Yeah, right. Then searching for health packs all the time. Um, like Halo can't really be, it would be dumb to downplay Halo's impact on like the console shooting space. And just in general, gigantic for that whole, I don't want to say birth of FPS, but birth of driven generation of FPS.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Especially the multiplayer aspect. But I feel like as technology and game society progresses in general, you're going to see more fast paced things that can be accommodated. But modern controllers. Back in the day, if that came out, people would be like, what is this crazy shit? Because I think the fastest thing back in the day would have been Unreal Tournament.
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah, Titanfall is definitely one of the faster paced ones. I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I have, um, I
00:33:30
Speaker
a relative resistance to motion sickness from first-person shooters. That doesn't bother me that much. There was a moment in the campaign where just the sheer, like, amount of things going on. And also, like, if you're standing on an uneven surface, like your view tilts, whereas, like, other first-person shooters, a lot of them just don't incorporate uneven services.
00:33:55
Speaker
Like if you're going to climb up to something, you climb up to an even surface. If you're on a roof, it's a flat surface, you know, whatever. Or if you're on an angle, your character still stands upright. In Titanfall, they don't do that. And so if you're running on like an angled surface, everything's tilted a little bit to the side and it can cause motion sickness. I just had a pinch of it just a little bit. Is that something that you... I mean, instead of obviously being motion sick, is this something you appreciate from a design standpoint?
00:34:25
Speaker
I think it's probably worth the sacrifice in this particular case, but that's with the caveat.
00:34:37
Speaker
I think it improved the game for what they were trying to do, which is this really high octane, move fast, run on things, jump off things, be a ninja.
Strategic Balance Between Titans and Pilots
00:34:49
Speaker
But that being said, as soon as that happened to me in the campaign, I was like, OK, here's here's a set of friends I don't think I could recommend at least playing the campaign to. Because these moments could bother them a lot more than it did me. It definitely limits the audience a little bit.
00:35:08
Speaker
Because Call of Duty is really fast compared to Battlefield normally. It's really fast compared to Halo. And Titanfall is really fast compared to Call of Duty. Especially in multiplayer. In single-player, a little more manageable.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah, it has pacing in that sense. Yeah, because it is verticality. Yeah, people are jumping around running on things. Like, at least in the campaign, you're usually up against foot soldiers and like robots, which you can hack with your data knife, which is awesome. But like you are the main character in single player. Exactly. That's the whole thing. You are the main character is going to go off and do cool shit.
00:35:55
Speaker
Grunts aren't gonna do anything. But if you're up against other main characters, they can do the same cool shit you can. So if you go run around and jump around like a maniac, so can they.
00:36:07
Speaker
Like all of those cool things we're talking about, like the stem to move really fast, the cloak to go invisible for a bit, the phase shift to vanish, those are multiplayer options. People can use those against you while running at you. So unless you're taking a long range engagement,
00:36:30
Speaker
Fights can get really hectic in melee pretty quickly. That's why you restore a grenade on my feet and wait. Yeah, satchel shards sit on it and wait to phase shift.
00:36:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's some other pilot sort of upgrades real quick. I just wanted to mention standard arrangement of throwables, gravity star, which is the mini graviton sort of ability, frag grenades, things like that. But then some kit optimizations, once you have that customization, one of them makes it so you can like enter your Titan faster. One of them,
00:37:11
Speaker
that makes your abilities charge a little bit quicker. Then there's things like wall hang. So you can kind of just like Spider-Man up on a wall and like point your gun and just sit there and camp on the side of a building. You know, like Spider-Man did.
00:37:27
Speaker
Hover, which is like if you're in the air and you hold ADS or aim down sights, your jet pack on your back will thrust in such a way to make you stationary, which is suicide multiplayer. And then other things like low profile.
00:37:47
Speaker
makes it harder to detect your character, and it's less obvious when you're jumping on a Titan. It takes longer for the call-out to happen, because usually if someone jumps on your Titan, it's called rodeoing, of course it is. It's like, hey, somebody's on top of you. Yeah, exactly. Try to pull out your batteries and such. It's a cool balancing between, we haven't really talked that much about Titans, but between the pilot and the Titan.
00:38:16
Speaker
Because you can just screw over a Titan if you can jump on it. It becomes a situation where they normally only have literally the ability Electric Smoke to get you off. If they don't have that ability, then they kind of have to deal with it or jump out and try to shoot you as a pilot. Then they'll do the battery rip thing. How did you feel about battery ripping in the game of Titanfall 2?
00:38:40
Speaker
It feels a little bit weird as a pilot jumping onto a giant mech, because we were doing the frontier defense, which is waves of enemies. And as the enemies get stronger, they're like, yeah, we'll send in big mechs. So you just jump on top, you rip out a battery, and deal a significant amount of damage, which is cool. But there wasn't a specific interaction. It was like, are you high enough and above them?
00:39:02
Speaker
are now rodeoing. You're magnetic to them if you touch them while you're in the air. Yeah, so you could definitely chain in between some enemies and that felt cool. Like I just went through a Home Depot and they like steal Enduracells from people. Yeah, it's very, very similar. But in that regard, again, drawing back to like Halo, usually if you have something
00:39:27
Speaker
larger than the actual player like a vehicle or a tank. It became more susceptible to heavy slow damage options like rocket launchers or grenades. There's also like a mountain kick somebody out, but as usually you have to get very close. And in a slower, more paced game like Halo, it was harder to do. So usually somebody's in a tank, you're like,
00:39:49
Speaker
I'm going to wait back here, not in tank site for a little bit until it's safer to go. Whereas in Titanfall, it was really cool to just kind of yeet, haul yourself up there and then just steal a battery and then watch the health drop I like have. Yeah. It's, it's very, um,
00:40:10
Speaker
It's asymmetrical gameplay where both sides can screw over the other side pretty easily. Yeah, it was never definitively like, oh, the mech wins in this or the pilot wins in this situation.
00:40:24
Speaker
For the second map, we actually had a defense wave that arrived before we all had our Titans, and they throw out one Titan in that defense wave. And although he has the ability to like one-shot players with a punch or like a gun just causes people to vaporize because they're of a caliber designed to fire against Titans, right?
00:40:45
Speaker
We would swarm this guy like as pilots like we're like ripping out batteries and firing our anti-titan weapons Which is probably similar to the corollary like at the rocket launcher in halo. Yeah It definitely feels like if there's two people who are coordinated against the titan you can just Chain up the battery steel and they're dead. Yeah there's a
00:41:09
Speaker
Like the balancing mechanic, as I mentioned, the electric smoke, that goes on cooldown once you use it. So if you see that a Titan deployed electric smoke, or you know they used a different ability, they don't have it in
Cinematic Elements and Level Design in Titanfall 2
00:41:20
Speaker
multiplayer or something, and you can start the rodeo, they have to jump out of the Titan to shoot you, at which point you're on the Titan, so you'll know if it like leans over so they can jump out. And maybe you can shoot them then, and then you've killed them and the Titan, right? Like engagement one,
00:41:39
Speaker
You cannot. They're linked to the pilots as part of a world building design thing. They have to go under like a brain link, which is the reason that the pilots can like. And the campaign do stupid stuff like stand in the open cockpit and like taunt you being like, I'm the next boss.
00:42:01
Speaker
Like, I don't like to nitpick stupid things that are done for the sake of cinematics. Whereas like, just the person, the main villain just going out and taunting you, openly exposed, could be shot at any point, doesn't get shot. Because like, that's the sake of doing that. But the whole time I was thinking like,
00:42:22
Speaker
I choose an agonist. I have like a mech gun. Yeah, high caliber rifle right here. And then we're just like kill person kill person weapon ready to go. Yeah. Yeah, that's dumb. I don't I I get that they're doing like the boss title card sequence. But it's I'm never I'm never a fan of it. Really do it. I think if unless you show me a picture, give me a little doo doo doo and get me hyped and only go through the stage and fight him later.
00:42:53
Speaker
I think if you're gonna do that sort of title card sequence, you gotta do it like Borderlands. You have to be like, here's the dramatic unveiling and some text off on the side. Make it really obvious that this is like the fourth wall boss unveiling. Don't have them stand an unarmored perch in front of their Titan while you have your like 40 millimeter explosive artillery cannon on your arm. That's dumb.
00:43:22
Speaker
Don't let us go out to dinner when they're ordering dessert. They whisper i'm the boss and then we start fighting like yeah, it's just weird Um, so you mentioned before the campaign the one level of effecting cause Yeah, you want to talk about that because I know we're just kind of going to
00:43:40
Speaker
Yeah, we're shotgunning through this. In short, you get a watch, essentially, that replaces your standard cloak ability. And it lets you fast forward or rewind to the past and then jump back to the present instantly, the second that you hit the interaction. There's no cool down.
00:44:06
Speaker
And they were like, all right, let's design a level around that mechanic. And it's really cool. It's very compared to the rest of the game. It's actually puzzle like, in a lot of ways, where it's like,
00:44:23
Speaker
They could have had a game based around this mechanic, basically. It would have been different than what Titanfall 2 turned into, but you could be fighting enemies in the present, in this dilapidated laboratory.
00:44:39
Speaker
and then they start to like wail on you a lot, you're really hurt. So you can flash back to the past where those enemies don't exist anymore. Reposition, heal up a little bit, let your regenerating health, thanks Halo, kick in. Get behind them and then flash back and just like assassinate a guy, do an execution. Yeah. I will point out at this point, there are enemies in the past and the present. So it's not like going to one is innately safe.
00:45:10
Speaker
Right. But it's pretty common that if you're fighting a group of enemies here in a given time, if you switch times, it's not going to be another group of enemies at the exact same spot. Exactly. It was usually laid out. So like, oh, I have an obstacle here. In this timeline, I can switch timelines, get through this door, or avoid laser wall or something. Laser wall, et cetera. So in that respect, it was really cool from design standpoint.
00:45:40
Speaker
But what bugged me a little bit, there was a section later on where it's, I felt like a slightly overdone thing in the campaign of, Hey, you have to do a side to side wall jump. The walls are staggered. What do you do? Like the same thing I've done every single level. And it would just added the layer of you have to press the interaction to shift the timeline to have those walls appear. Okay.
00:46:07
Speaker
Why'd that bother you? The overall mechanic was cool, but no, it was just the side-to-side wall jumps. It felt like it got done a little bit too much. Okay. Because it would seem to be done every level, possibly multiple times. Yeah.
00:46:22
Speaker
that particular sequence I think was probably they changed the setting and like what you were jumping off and things like that but there was including the climax of the game many sequences that were side to side wall jumps were like hey we've got a mobility system I'm like I know you do I've used it already right so in that regard it was
00:46:47
Speaker
Still slightly overdone, but also really cool. Like I said, I like the movement overall. There was the other level. Do you remember the name of it where it was kind of like dynamically building? I can't remember the name of the level. Test fighting arenas.
00:47:02
Speaker
But yeah, it's like manufactured, like a platform would come out and then they drop like couches and a mannequin bookcases, stuff like that. And this is happening in like a factory. So the platform is moving down this massive conveyor line, like absurdly large factory. It doesn't make any sense, but it's a sci-fi world. So it's cool. And you get to, uh, follow this across this factory as it's like tilting the platform and adding more things.
00:47:30
Speaker
Yeah, that felt much more dynamic and that was probably, I'd say definitely my favorite level out of the whole campaign. It culminates in this nice sequence where it's like taking the pre-manufactured pieces and like making, kind of like Nuketown and Call of Duty or like... It's like a live combat test area. Yeah, exactly. So here are some buildings, here's where some hostages or hostiles would be, and then you get to test out combat scenarios.
00:48:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's really cool to see that built in real time. I will say that level is a little bit confusing sometimes for where to go. If you don't really know that you're trying to go all the way down this conveyor, there's lots of points you can fight off and jump enemies or you're encouraged to. And since it is so large, it's not always well telegraphed where forward is. But it's a relatively rare issue, I think, in the game.
00:48:30
Speaker
We should talk about Titans a little bit though like we've we touched on the campaign. I think it's got great points There's some points that were like I literally the mark them off as high points But I don't even want to talk about them in case people haven't done the campaign Overall it was really well received when it came out. I think going back and replaying it's Largely to introduce people to some of the multiplayer components but
Titan Classes and Abilities
00:48:57
Speaker
I think it's good. Just maybe you shouldn't have overhyped it so much. Yeah. I mean, that's everything in the nutshell for me, though. I'm much more of a pessimist. And I tend not to enjoy the same things that other people do, sometimes out of just ignorant spite. So I can be wishy-washy in that regard. But as far as the Titans, I think I initially really was drawn to Ion because it had like a
00:49:25
Speaker
a fast DPS rate, it had lasers and that was pretty cool. And then you turned me on to Tone. Tone, yeah. Which was a pretty balanced neck. It had much more like a Goss Cannon tracker, which then once you hit an enemy, I think two or three times with your main gun, still dealt damage, but also it automatically locked on for rockets. So when you press your Q, it fire rockets, but this could happen to multiple enemies as well.
00:49:52
Speaker
So you can have like three or four lock-ons and just be like volley. Also, the Titans have fucking ults. So if you build up enough charge in the case of tone, it was literally like unleash all rockets. Yeah, it's salvo core. Kind of like Pharah, but you could move. Yeah, there's one that literally is Pharah's. I think it's North Star.
00:50:17
Speaker
Oh, where it jumps up? Yeah, it flies in its core. It's a flight core. And then it just fires a ton of rockets. It's literally fair. The distinction there is Titans cannot jump normally. Yeah, like the space there is usually like a quick kind of dash reposition. It's like, let's say a pilot's jumping at you, you can be like, I'm gonna reposition back, shoot him midair while he's jumping.
00:50:42
Speaker
It's also basically just enough horizontal movement to negate the lock-on of most of the lock-on missiles other titans have. So if you get a lock-on and they start like a salvo, not like a salvo core,
00:51:00
Speaker
Cause some of those will probably still hit, but you should still dodge that because otherwise it's death. Try and dodge projectiles in general, please. Yeah. The missiles will usually like curve past you with that much horizontal movement. So keeping one of your charges, they like recharge over time. It's just like a dash. Um, uh, if you know, the opponent has missiles can be really good. Yeah. It's just, it's a nice option. It is weird not to be able to jump in the next though, but I feel that if you could,
00:51:31
Speaker
It would be troublesome. There's like, there's one. So the one we already mentioned. So these are different chassis that we're describing that have like different loadouts and weapons and abilities. Northstar has like a VTOL mode where not a VTOL like transform, but it like hovers a bit. It's not a full jump, but it does give you some height to get over things or like peak buildings, which makes sense because it's the sniper. It's the sniper Titan.
00:51:59
Speaker
The other key thing is a lot of mechs have options to deploy shields, which are put out in front of them. But if you're able to theoretically jump over that or get some height on it, you can overshoot the shield and hit the mech behind it. Yeah, it's kind of like a buckler to go to actual real world shield terminology. It's slightly larger than that. It's like a medium shield. It doesn't really cover the legs super great.
00:52:26
Speaker
Not too hard to shoot around unless you're right in front of it. Well, I was thinking of, um, tones deployable, which is more of like the pilot version. Exactly. You're going to like drop a thing in front of you. A little energy shield comes up kind of. Popular.
00:52:41
Speaker
Yeah, you can shoot through it, the enemy can't. Helps you get the... That's one of the reasons I love tone. And I put most of my Titan time on to tone is the artillery cannon, the deployable shield. The kit of tone doesn't have anything that I hate. The only thing that's situational in that particular mode we were playing, Frontier Defense, is the sonar.
00:53:04
Speaker
beacon you can kind of shoot out. I probably underutilized that. But it's amazing in PVP. If there's a building where there's like pilots running around doing guerrilla warfare against you, and you're like, I have no idea where these ants are, how am I supposed to kill them?
00:53:22
Speaker
Sonar beacon. Oh, he's there. He's in that building. He's about to peek this window And greet them with the 40 millimeter artillery shot Again, by the way, it only takes one Yeah, it takes one bullet to kill They explode instantly. It's it's huge The
00:53:45
Speaker
I was going to mention for the shields the different Titans have. Some of them are like, I think Ion. Ion has like the vortex shield, which is like grab projectiles in the air, then throw them back out. It's telekinesis from Bioshock, if you're familiar with that. That one's pretty good. Scorch has an offensive shield.
00:54:06
Speaker
Scorch's deal is like, he fires very slowly, but he does like area denial thermite stuff. His shield is a flame shield. He holds in front of him. It looks like the vortex shield, but it vaporizes projectiles on impact and burns whatever touches it. So if a pilot is jumping at you and you're on ION, your vortex shield is not going to help you much. They'll just like jump through it. Pilots are not projectiles as it turns out.
00:54:33
Speaker
But if you're Scorch and you hold the Flame Shield, they vaporize on touch in that thing. Scorch actually has an execution where he holds the Flame Shield against a doomed Titan and just burns through their entire chassis. He just pushes it forward, kills the pilot, and destroys the chassis. It's amazing.
00:54:56
Speaker
That's pretty badass. Also doomed for the uninitiated is like if you get a Titan's health down enough, they go to a doomed state, meaning they're susceptible to like an instant kill by a Titan. But it doesn't like their health will slowly tick down, but they have a chance to like get batteries or other ways to like mitigate the damage and not die immediately. It also might take a lot more damage. Yeah, way quicker. So if you see something it's doing, you need to pop with a couple more shots, focus them down.
00:55:27
Speaker
to finish them off or go in for the execution. And then each Titan has their own, probably at least two execution options. Yeah. Then, then Titans usually have, um, one or two. And then there was some prime ones, which were like, Hey, do you want to give us more money for a different skin, but have like a different execution animation? But it's the same name, like ion prime, whatever prime, um,
00:55:53
Speaker
But yeah, there's some fun interactions with the Doom state because it turns into a game of chicken, in a way.
Titanfall Mechanics and Multiplayer Customization
00:56:04
Speaker
Because while your Titan's doomed, all of your weapons still work, all of your cooldowns still work, your core still works.
00:56:11
Speaker
And Titans, again, can one-shot players and are devastatingly offensively powerful. So as soon as you get doomed, you might not want to mash the ejection button. You could, at which point your Titan will explode when you jump out safely. But if you stick around, like you mentioned, you're susceptible to being one-hit killed in an awesome kill animation if another Titan gets in melee.
00:56:37
Speaker
And it's very hard to recover from the Doomstate in multiplayer. It might actually be impossible and competitive like in PvP. Yeah, I don't know what their drop rate is for batteries or even if they have them. Well, the batteries work like a little bit different in PvP. It only provides like a shield instead of actually repairing the Titan. So it's really hard to or might be impossible to repair Titans in PvP.
00:57:04
Speaker
I can't believe we didn't even talk about the Titan fall itself. Oh yeah. 56 minutes. So in the same way that Titans have their ultimate ability like the laser core, salvo core.
00:57:16
Speaker
jumping up a little bit. Wow. Cool. Players and shooting rockets and shooting rockets. It's flight. It's not probably not the core. Flight is the core. Yeah. Players have a way of after they deal enough damage or overtime to summon in a Titan, which is the Titan fall where you pick a place and after I think it's four or five seconds, the Titan will drop in and you can get in a Titan. Yada, yada.
00:57:43
Speaker
one quick you can drop titans on things mainly players other titans it's awesome it's a one hit yeah it's just instantly dead now is there an indicator for other players like hey it's coming in here
00:58:01
Speaker
They get a, I think they get an audible from whoever their commander is on their side saying like enemy Titan fall inbound. So you get like a heads up that a Titan is entering the fight somewhere on the battlefield, but you don't know. It's a nuclear watch detected and you're like, yes. Search for the dot.
00:58:20
Speaker
Just a quick aside on that, if you want to kill things with your Titan, by default when it drops, it drops and it has a deployable invincibility shield. The Titan can't attack while the shield's up, enemy pilots will die if they try to run through the shield. Okay, that's what happened to me previously when we were playing. Okay, yeah. I didn't know. I didn't see smoke and I was like, how did I die when I tried to rodeo?
00:58:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's basically like a, it's, it's your safety timer so that like someone doesn't lose their Titan as soon as it drops before they even get to it. Cause you have to like run to your Titan. Um, but you can choose to get like a side grade called warp fall, which causes your Titan to drop even faster. I think it's twice as fast. It's like in two and a half seconds or something, but it won't drop with the shield.
00:59:13
Speaker
If you're specifically trying to kill things by dropping your Titan on them, it still works. It just doesn't drop with the shield. So it can get lit or like obliterated on impact, or not on impact, but right after it arrives. There's a lot of trade-off like abilities like that for you can pick for your kit. It seems to be fun to have played around with for sure. Because while I like standard FPS,
00:59:41
Speaker
and standard ways to win in games. It's really fun to experiment with, hey, but what if I was that shitty person who everybody hated, and you find that one interesting cheesy thing. Like for a while, what was the option in Call of Duty where you dropped a grenade on death? Mardardum. Mardardum. So it's very fast-paced, running and gunning like a small town area.
01:00:09
Speaker
So somebody might shoot you and then like run past you to go to the, the next person on the map. Uh, so that you just get a kill and they would die. And it was seen as really cheesy. Yeah. People hated that. Yeah. That new tubing, other things, but it'd be interesting to be like, I'm just going to call shit down and be the mortar guy always at a range.
01:00:33
Speaker
There's a lot of, we were talking about upgrades and things. One of the upgrades you can get is an AI chip, which just makes your, it takes the slot of what you could use to use something else to make your Titan better, but it makes your Titan better in autopilot mode. So you can choose to like, as soon as your Titan is fallen, as soon as it's ready for you to jump in, Embark is what it's called. You can also hit a button to be like,
01:00:59
Speaker
Actually, just go do your thing. The shield will vanish, the Titan will get up, and it'll start fighting on its own, either defending a location or following you. And some pilots never really jump in their Titan. They might use the auto chip, so it's better at fighting other players. It's never as good as if a player was in it, but it can still be a deterrent because it can one-shot people.
01:01:26
Speaker
But there's so much customization around that. Some people are like, I had a loadout that was specialized for stealing batteries out of Titans. Because if you can get to a friendly Titan with a battery, you can put the battery in, give them a shield like we were talking about. And you've shifted the resources in this like pilot versus Titan fight. You're playing support, basically.
01:01:53
Speaker
And it feels awesome. There's like, cloak is really good for that. If you want to screw people over when you're Titan dies, you can get nuclear ejection.
01:02:05
Speaker
which I know I died to many times while we were playing, which is basically if your Titan's in the Doom state, when you eject, it goes nuclear. You launch crazy high into the sky, so you don't die to the nuke. And everything near your Titan dies, pretty much.
01:02:27
Speaker
Although I just panic AOE denial. Exactly. Yeah. And I would eject from my nuclear Titan while there was a surface above me. So I kind of just bonk my head and then drop right back down into the explosion and die instantly. I don't know. It's tons of fun.
01:02:47
Speaker
One thing, sorry, I know I'm rambling, but I love Titanfire. There's one Titan I want to talk about that we actually hadn't played with yet, but I looked at. It was the last one released. It's called Monarch. Its core is you choose a set of upgrades when customizing your Titan, and each of your core unlocks, gives you another one of those upgrades. So rather than being like, I'm going to do a bunch of damage,
01:03:16
Speaker
your titan just gets better as you upgrade three times and it gets things like energy vampire and all this other stuff it can do supporty things it's it's really freaking cool and i want to play around with it so it just gets better over time yeah whenever you unlock your core so um when you would have had flank or flake or whatever having salvo core it just overall stat boost
01:03:41
Speaker
Yeah, you have your standard set of Titan upgrades, which all Titans get, and then you get to pick another three from three different pools, like Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. And then every time you use your upgrade ability, once your core is complete, you get another one of those unlocked. Oh, nice. So you just get to be better than everyone else on the battlefield, but...
01:04:04
Speaker
your Titan has to be around. So this is a Titan for people to use if they really like the Titan gameplay and don't like the pilot gameplay as much.
01:04:15
Speaker
I think it's impressive. I'm going to circle the closing thoughts I know at this point. But it's impressive that a game that is so fun to be in a Titan can also have pilot gameplay that's compelling enough that I know Dave here was running around as a pilot fighting Titans in our defense maps when his Titan was up. He could jump in the Titan at any time.
01:04:42
Speaker
It's fun. It's like, is anybody in the titan? I'm like, no, I'm busy. I think it's just it's a good sign of game design that both ways to play are compelling. And you're not like, oh, I have my titan. I'll always be in there. Yeah, it's. I don't know, I hate linear gameplay design for anything where it's like, hey, here's the one right way to do it.
01:05:12
Speaker
Because it then comes down to, are you this type of person or not? Because if you're not, the whole game's not for you. But it's just good to have options. Because there were times for the Wade defense where it's easier for me to get up here, fuck up a squad of mortars, then go back to my Titan, and then fight some other Titans.
01:05:34
Speaker
Maybe if my time is too far away, I'll get on my anti-tighten weapon and just start blasting. I never felt like I was really forced to be in one or the other.
Titanfall 2's Lasting Appeal and PvP Experiences
01:05:49
Speaker
I did enjoy our frontier defense.
01:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, I would play it more. I'd grab people and play it again. Titanfall is unfortunately like... I don't think it's 100% guaranteed we're going to get a third one. I wanted to mention here at the end that Titanfall 2 had kind of a belabored release because EA released Battlefield 1 like seven days before Titanfall 2. And it had a massive impact on sales.
01:06:21
Speaker
We're usually only getting one game a season maybe.
01:06:26
Speaker
And like the holiday season's pretty contested, but, and sometimes you can't get around that. Like, but you're usually fighting games from other publishers or for other consoles or like, do I get Halo or Gears? Do I get Killzone or Gears? Do I need to like get whatever or Gears? Did you actually play Gears of War? I have never played Gears. I thoroughly do not enjoy that game.
01:06:53
Speaker
It didn't look like the type of game I would want to play, but I could be wrong. I've never played it. But Titanfall, I love and I like the gameplay more than I like Battlefield's gameplay, and I like the gameplay more than I call Duty's gameplay. And it's probably less addictive for me than like a more team based composition game like Overwatch, but
01:07:22
Speaker
I want the series to continue and EA is just like kneecap them. Just take them out back as EA does. Hopefully they don't make that mistake again. It's 2016.
01:07:38
Speaker
No, they will. They're really good at what they do. In that regard. Friend of the show, yeah. Not really. Something that I wish I did play at the time. So I feel like I would have enjoyed multiplayer and kind of experimenting with different play styles. But now, even though I said I'm average at FPS, I'm probably bad at FPS compared to people who have been playing for these past years, especially in a game that fast-paced and dynamic.
01:08:08
Speaker
I have enough trouble with Left 4 Dead 2 where most of the zombies are running at you in a straight line. To be fair, the engine for Titanfall 2 is a little bit newer than Source 2 or whatever Left 4 Dead was on. Yeah, that's true.
01:08:26
Speaker
Definitely rush from a PvP set. Let's say I almost said divinity. I keep wanting to say divinity. Destiny. Right. When are we going to have an episode on divinity? Oh, the first one. Yeah. Now, every time we play Destiny, I enjoy doing raids as a group because it's a group PvE.
01:08:45
Speaker
Whenever we were in PvP, I never felt like I was styling on somebody. I always felt like somebody was just ruining my day and I was suffering through it for some achievement for like a daily or a weekly unlock. And I hated it. There was primarily chocolate to me just being bad, not the gameplay itself being bad.
01:09:07
Speaker
I mean some of these games also just take like a little Like a little bit more play time like people who are playing overwatch, you know, there are a large The longer a game is out the better the player base on averages. Yes, that's what I was trying to say So if you like do game tourism where you're just like hey, I'm gonna play Titanfall PvP. What's this game? You know, it's gonna be rough. Um
01:09:30
Speaker
There was one mode called attrition, which I think was one of the premier modes in Titanfall 2, which was 6v6. And it's basically, there's like grunts, the normal campaign type enemies on both sides, and they'll fight each other and they'll try to fight players. And I'm going to put that in like massive quotes because they can kill you, but man, you have to let them. There should be strong troopers.
01:09:55
Speaker
Yes, and you get points for killing the grunts and more points for killing the players. But if your team's over there doing the PvP thing, you can be like, I'm going to wipe out their ground forces and actually massively contribute to the team. I love modes like that. I love where people can contribute in different ways.
01:10:17
Speaker
It's kind of like a MOBA where if it kind of mattered more that you kill like the actual minions, right?
Podcast Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:10:25
Speaker
Or you got points or something. Objective base gaming. I can talk about Titanfall forever though, so I'm not going to. Titanfall 2 Episode Part 2. Where I will just sit quietly and let Jake continue. I'm a fan of the game. I hope they make more. I enjoyed with little I played of it.
01:10:47
Speaker
Definitely feel like certain parts were overhyped, but overall, definitely a positive review from me.
01:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think maybe it would have been better if we would have evaluated it closer to release when we could try more of the PVP stuff out and stuff. But who knows, you know? We'll just have to look forward to Titanfall 3. Yeah, we should probably play and review games closer to release. Stay tuned next week for Space Invaders. Right.
01:11:23
Speaker
And that's going to be the real tell of whether we've made it as a podcast that we can have an hour long episode on Space Invaders and not like I would just cheat off the wiki and steal from the wiki. All right. Well, thank you guys for listening to another episode of soapstone.
01:11:42
Speaker
As always, you could send your feedback in, if you want to do that, to our Gmail at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or one could join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast where we are happy to interact with people and like messages and heart messages. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good day.
01:12:12
Speaker
you