So the Titanfall beta wrapped up yesterday and I think my sleep schedule has actually been damaged. Like, permanently, possibly. I stayed up till 2am on a Friday playing a video game, which is not something I do anymore, or wasnt, until this weekend.
For anyone who hasnt been paying attention (fair, there was a lot going on the last two weeks), Titanfall is the new shooter from Respawn Entertainment, which is basically the old Infinity Ward guys, Jason West and Vince Zampella, the same people who built Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 before Activision pushed them out in that whole ugly lawsuit thing back in 2010. Respawn signed with EA instead and Titanfall is their first game. The open beta ran from last Tuesday through Saturday on Xbox One and PC, and I burned most of my weekend in it.
Quick version for the uninitiated: youre a "Pilot," you run around on foot doing wall-runs and double-jumps, and every few minutes a hulking mech called a Titan drops out of the sky for you to climb into and stomp around in. Then eventually it gets destroyed or you eject and youre back to being a fragile little human sprinting along rooftops. I played on PC, mostly the Attrition mode, since I dont own an Xbox One yet (my roommate does, and he hogged it the entire weekend, which is a separate complaint I could write 400 words about).
Heres my actual opinion, not a hedge: the Titan drop is the best five seconds in a shooter Ive played in years. You call one in, theres this rumble, and it just crashes down through the map with this metal-on-concrete sound that I felt more than heard through my crappy PC speakers. First time it happened I actually said "oh" out loud, alone, in my apartment, like an idiot. That moment alone justifies a chunk of the hype.
The wall-running took me embarrassingly long to get comfortable with. I spent the first two matches basically faceplanting into walls instead of running along them, which, if anyone was watching my kill-death ratio those first two rounds, was not a good look. By Saturday I had it mostly figured out and it genuinely changes how you think about a map, youre never just on the ground looking for cover, youre thinking in three dimensions the whole match.
Not everything worked. The servers on day one were rough, I got dropped from three matches Tuesday night with some error code I didnt bother writing down. Matchmaking sometimes stuck me in games that were basically already decided, 2-on-6, and there isnt a great way to back out without eating a penalty. And the AI grunts that fill out the smaller maps are, fine, theyre there to pad the kill feed and make new players feel competent, but after a few hours they started to feel like set dressing rather than actual threats. I want the human fights, not target practice.
Also, sidebar, I dont love that this is basically a launch title tied to convincing people to buy a $500 console. The Xbox One version releases March 11th alongside the PC version, and the Xbox 360 port, being built by a different studio (Bluepoint), doesnt show up until the 25th. I get why EA structured it that way but it still feels a little gross watching a genuinely great multiplayer shooter get used as bait for hardware nobody I know actually owns yet. My roommate is the only person in my group of friends with an Xbox One and he mostly uses it to watch Netflix.
Anyway. Beta access is closed now, which means Im staring down a two week wait with nothing to do except replay the same three maps in my head. Ive already told myself Im not preordering, and Ive already half broken that promise by having a tab open to check prices. We'll see how long that lasts. If the full release keeps that Titan-drop feeling intact for more than the first hour, I think this is the multiplayer game a lot of us end up playing way past whatever comes out next.