So I finally got my hands on Titanfall this week, two nights after it actually came out, because my copy from Amazon showed up a day late (thanks a lot, whoever's driving that truck). Respawn's been talking this game up since last E3 and honestly the hype train had me a little skeptical going in. Vince Zampella and Jason West, the guys who built the first two Modern Warfares before Activision imploded their studio, started fresh with Respawn specifically to make this. EA's publishing it. Xbox One and PC only for now, sixty bucks standard, eighty for the version with the extra cosmetic junk nobody needed.
First impression: the mech stuff is genuinely great. You call down a Titan from orbit, it slams into the map, and for about ten seconds you feel like the most powerful thing on the battlefield before some guy on a jetpack rodeos you off your own cockpit and dumps a clip into your reactor core by hand. That move alone is worth the price of admission. Wall-running took me an embarrassingly long time to feel natural doing, maybe forty minutes of just running into walls at bad angles like an idiot before my brain rewired itself.
Here's my actual complaint though, and its not a small one. There is no offline mode. None. Not even the "campaign," which is really just six multiplayer maps with some voiceover bolted on top explaining why two armies are shooting each other. You want to play by yourself for twenty minutes on a Tuesday night? Too bad, you need Xbox Live and a working connection to Respawn's servers, full stop. Ive got a decent home connection and even I hit a stretch Tuesday around 9pm where I couldn't get matched into a game for almost twenty minutes straight. Just sat on a loading screen. Turns out a ton of people had the exact same problem that first week, servers getting hammered by launch traffic, matchmaking timing out, the whole thing. It got better by the weekend but that first taste was rough.
I get why they did it this way, cloud computing for the AI grunts and titans and whatnot, keeps the console hardware from having to do as much heavy lifting. Fine, I buy the technical argument. But calling something a full-price sixty dollar game with zero ability to play it without a server checking in feels like a decision made by a publisher, not a developer, and I dont love where that trend is heading. SimCity did this a year ago and got dragged for it. Diablo III did it too. Now its just... normal? Nobody even blinks anymore.
Anyway. Complaints aside, once you're actually in a match, its the most fun Ive had with a shooter in a long while. The pacing is fast, six versus six keeps it from turning into the sprawling nonsense some of the big Battlefield maps become, and the AI grunts running around give you something to mow down between actual player encounters so you never feel like the map is empty. If you've got an Xbox One already or a PC that can push it, its worth the money. If you were on the fence about buying an Xbox One specifically for this, I'd wait, honestly — there's a 360 version coming out of a different studio in a couple weeks and by most accounts it's a rough downgrade, so that's not really the move either.
Small unrelated thing I noticed this week: the web turned 25 this month. Tim Berners-Lee's original proposal at CERN was dated March 1989, and it's wild to think this dumb little blog of mine, sitting here since late 2011, is a tiny speck on a pile of documents that started with one guy trying to convince his bosses that hyperlinked pages were worth funding. Puts the "always online" grumbling in a different light I guess. The whole point of the thing was connection in the first place.
Going back to grinding Attrition mode now. If youre playing on PC and want to team up sometime, my old gamer tag from the Modern Warfare 2 days still works fine for finding me, some things never change.