Yesterday was Pi Day, the big one, 3/14/14, the only Pi Day any of us will see that lines up to four whole digits, since the next one isn't until 2114 and none of us are going to be around for that. My office did the thing where someone brings in an actual pie and everyone stands around the break room making the same joke about irrational numbers. I had two slices. No regrets. Anyway, that's not really what I sat down to write about, it just felt wrong not to mention it before moving on.
What I actually want to talk about is Titanfall, which came out this past Tuesday for Xbox One and PC, and which I have now spent an embarrassing chunk of my weekend playing instead of doing literally anything on my to-do list.
If you haven't been paying attention, Titanfall is the new game from Respawn Entertainment, the studio Vince Zampella and Jason West started after they got pushed out of Infinity Ward (the Call of Duty people) back in 2010. EA's publishing it. The pitch is simple on paper: 6v6 multiplayer shooter, you're a "pilot" running around on foot with a jump kit that lets you wall-run and double-jump, and every few minutes you can call in a Titan, a giant mech, and hop inside it and start stomping people. It sounds gimmicky written out like that but it plays better than it sounds, honestly. The wall-running especially — once it clicks, going back to a normal shooter where you just walk on the ground feels like moving through mud.
The thing everyone's been talking about, though, isn't the wall-running, it's the servers. Titanfall doesn't have local dedicated servers or peer-to-peer hosting the way most console shooters do — it runs entirely on Microsoft's Azure cloud, and Respawn has been pretty loud about that being the whole reason the game can afford to have AI grunt soldiers running around the map doing pathfinding and shooting at you while 12 human players are also doing their thing. It's a neat idea. Whether it's a neat idea that's actually necessary or just a good marketing line for Xbox One is a separate question, and I don't think I'm qualified to answer it. What I can tell you is that on Saturday night my connection dropped twice mid-match and I got booted back to the menu both times, which is exactly the failure mode you'd expect from "always online," and exactly the failure mode that makes me twitchy about games that require it. I don't need my shooter to also require a functioning ISP at 11pm on a weekend, but here we are.
There's no traditional single-player campaign either, by the way, which is going to bother some people more than others. There's a "campaign" mode, but it's really just the multiplayer maps in a fixed order with some story stuff playing over the loudspeakers while you fight. I actually don't mind this? I never finish campaigns anyway, mine usually sit half-played for months, so getting the story beats folded into the mode I was going to play regardless works fine for me. Your mileage will vary.
One more gripe, and it's not really Respawn's fault so much as it's a Microsoft-deal fault: if you're on Xbox 360, you're waiting until the 25th for your version, and if you're on PS4, you're not getting one at all right now because of the timed exclusivity arrangement. I get why the deal exists, Microsoft clearly wanted a system-seller for Xbox One and paid for it, but it's a rough one for anyone who bought a 360 or a PS4 last winter expecting day-one access to the biggest shooter of the spring. I'm on PC through Origin, so it's not my problem this time around, but it was my problem with a different game a couple years back and I remember exactly how it feels to watch everyone else post screenshots two weeks before you get to.
Anyway. Sixty bucks, no campaign in the classic sense, servers that occasionally fall over, and I still can't stop playing it. Make of that what you will. I'm going to go lose another few matches before bed.