Titanfall ate my whole night and I regret nothing except the queue times
So Titanfall came out yesterday for Xbox One and PC, and I did the thing where you tell yourself you'll just play "an hour or two" and then it's 1 AM and you've got work in seven hours. Worth it, mostly. Not entirely.
I'd been half-following this game since the reveal at E3 last year, mostly because of who made it. Respawn is basically the old Infinity Ward brain trust, Vince Zampella and Jason West, the guys who built the first few Call of Duty games and then got pushed out of Activision in that whole ugly 2010 lawsuit mess. So there's a "we'll show them" energy baked into this thing whether Respawn admits it or not, and honestly I think it worked. Wall-running and double-jumping around a map while giant mechs stomp around below you is a genuinely different feeling than another CoD reskin, which is not a knock on CoD, I've put stupid hours into Modern Warfare, it's just nice to have something that doesn't play exactly the same.
Couple of complaints though, because a review that's all praise isn't a review, it's a press release.
First: no server browser at launch. None. You get matchmaking and that's it, which for a multiplayer-only shooter feels like a weirdly big omission in 2014. I want to pick region, ping, game mode combos like it's 2007 again, and instead I'm at the mercy of whatever the matchmaker decides is "close enough." Respawn's said this is coming later, which, fine, but it should've been there day one for sixty dollars.
Second, and this is the bigger one: the whole thing is always-online, and on PC that means routing through Origin, EA's launcher, which has never once in its life felt fast to me. My connection dropped twice last night for reasons that had nothing to do with Titanfall itself, my router's just old and cranky, and both times it just booted me straight out of the match with zero grace period. No single-player mode to fall back on either, because Titanfall doesn't really have one, the "campaign" is just multiplayer matches with some extra voiceover and scripted moments bolted on. I don't hate that idea in theory. In practice, when your internet hiccups, you've got literally nothing to do but stare at a menu.
None of that stopped me from playing for four hours straight, so take my complaining with the appropriate grain of salt. The Titan drop animation alone, watching your mech fall out of the sky and land with that crunch, is worth the price of admission on its own. I embarrassed myself running face-first into walls for the first half hour before wall-running clicked, in a way that's a little bit funny in retrospect.
Small aside because I can't not mention it: today's also, technically, the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, since Tim Berners-Lee handed his "Information Management: A Proposal" memo to his boss at CERN on March 12, 1989. Every tech site on earth is running some version of "the web turns 25" today so I won't bore you with the whole history, but it's a strange thing to sit with while writing a blog post, on the web, about a game I bought over the web, using a launcher that phones home over the web every time I want to shoot a robot. Twenty-five years and we still haven't figured out server browsers, apparently.
Anyway. If you've got an Xbox One or a decent PC and you don't mind matchmaking roulette, Titanfall's worth the sixty bucks. Just maybe don't start a match five minutes before you need to leave the house, because there's no pausing this either.