So I've had Titanfall installed for exactly a week now (it came out last Tuesday, the 11th) and I think I've finally got enough distance from the hype cycle to say something useful about it instead of just yelling "MECHS" at my monitor.
Quick background for anyone who's been ignoring gaming Twitter: Titanfall is the first game out of Respawn Entertainment, which is basically the old Infinity Ward crew, the guys who made the original Modern Warfare, before EA and Activision had their whole ugly falling-out a few years back. It's published by EA, its Xbox One/PC exclusive (no PS4 version, and Sony fans have not let anyone forget this), and it runs $59.99 like every other big release this generation. I grabbed the PC version because my Xbox One is currently doing a great impression of a paperweight next to the TV.
Here's the thing that actually surprised me, and its not the mechs, which are called Titans and are exactly as fun as you'd hope: it's that there's basically no traditional single-player campaign. The "campaign" is just the multiplayer maps played in a specific order with some dialogue barked at you over the radio while people are shooting at you. I went in expecting a Call of Duty style set-piece campaign because, well, these are the Call of Duty guys, and instead I got six-on-six matches with a story bolted loosely on top. Took me about two matches to stop being annoyed about it and just enjoy the matches on their own terms.
Six versus six is the other thing worth talking about, and I think it's the actually interesting design decision here, more interesting than the wall-running or the double-jumping honestly. Every other big shooter this console generation has been pushing player counts up (or promising to, once the servers can handle it). Titanfall goes the other way. Six humans per side, plus a bunch of AI-controlled grunts filling out the battlefield, plus eventually your Titan dropping in from orbit once your rodeo meter fills up. It sounds like it should feel empty. It doesn't. It feels like a packed match with six players you actually need to pay attention to, instead of forty players who all blur together. I did not expect to prefer this, but I do.
One more genuinely notable thing: there's no dedicated server browser, no peer to peer hosting, none of that. Every match runs on cloud servers, Microsoft's Azure setup specifically, and Respawn has been pretty open about building the netcode around that from day one instead of bolting cloud support on later. I was skeptical going in (my internet is fine but not great, and I live in an apartment where the router is basically decorative half the time), and matches have genuinely been smoother than I expected. Whether that holds up once the initial launch rush settles down I couldn't tell you, ask me in a month.
Complaint time, because no blog post about a new release is complete without one: the UI for party chat and matchmaking on PC is rough. Not broken, just clunky, like it was designed for a controller first and someone remembered PC players exist about two weeks before launch. Also I miss split screen, which is a weird thing to miss in 2014 but I used to play these games on a couch with my brother and now everyone just sort of plays alone in different rooms of different houses, which, fine, that's just what gaming is now I guess, doesn't mean I have to love it.
Anyway. If you've got an Xbox One collecting dust because there's nothing to play on it yet, this is the reason to dust it off. If you're on PC, get a controller if you can, the wall-running feels better with a stick than a mouse for me personally, though I know that's an unpopular opinion in some corners of the internet. Either way I'll probably still be playing this in April, which is more than I can say for most of what came out this winter.