After you’re done reading this, I’m sure that many of you will be shocked by my somewhat unique opinions on Titanfall. People may claim that I just have these opinions of the game to be “different,” or to send shockwaves rippling through the gaming community. Neither of those would be true, if I’m being honest. I just can’t bring myself to be excited by Titanfall at all. Ok, that may not be entirely true. Watching giant mechs lumber through the streets gunning down agile foot soldiers who are skirmishing around them definitely looks awesome. And perhaps it feels awesome as well, I wouldn’t know, I’ve never gotten a hands on experience with the game.
Before we get into Titanfall itself, I’d like to flash back almost four years, to the spring of 2010. Many will remember that this is when Jason West and Vince Zampella, the president and CEO of Infinity Ward, respectively, had been booted from Activision for reasons that we really still aren’t 100% clear on. At this point, the company was riding the wave of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s successes. It seemed that they had hit the peak of the franchise, the gaming community was eating up Call of Duty games, and other developers were being left in the dust by the staggering sales numbers. Much of this had come as a result of the work done by West and Zampella, integral members of Infinity Ward. After their departure in March, the two wasted no time in starting a new gaming studio, which they announced in April of that year would be called Respawn Entertainment.
I’m sure many of you are bored by the history lesson. However, it’s important to establish that information before I get into the meat of what I have to say. As I’ve already mentioned, the Call of Duty franchise was hugely popular, and it had sales to back it up. Unlike most people, I never liked Call of Duty, or, for that matter, any other realistic first person shooters. I guess that, perhaps, they just weren’t for me. But I think that it had more to do with the fact that I play video games because I want a strong, interactive, narrative. If you listened to the first episode of We the Gamercast, you’ll likely have heard me run down my top five games of all time, a list that included games such as Bioshock, Halo, and Batman: Arkham City. Sure, those games were all fun to play and had great gameplay, but I loved them for the narratives that they told. And so when I played the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaign, I didn’t enjoy it at all, because the plot was weak and propped up by some of the most terrible dialogue in a video campaign. On top of that, I just didn’t have fun with the gameplay, and, needless to say, the same was true of its sequel, Modern Warfare 2.
So, when West and Zampella announced that they were putting together a new studio, I just did not care. I was never a fan of any of their previous work, so why would I be excited by the fact that the duo would be putting out another game? From the start of Respawn Entertainment’s existence, I was opposed to ever buying a game they put out. Soon after, however, my perspectives on gaming changed, and I came to the realization that there was no reason not to give this new studio a chance to prove me wrong. Who knows, maybe they would put out one of the best games ever, and I would have missed it because I’d dismissed the studio completely. So my position on the studio changed from “I don’t care about this studio” to simply being cautiously optimistic about their output.
If I haven’t bored all of you to death yet, allow me to finally move on to talking about Titanfall. Like most people, the initial footage out of E3 had me excited for the game, and I had come to terms with putting my fears about Respawn Entertainment completely to rest. I mean, the game just sounded awesome. But as I continued to watch the gameplay footage, I became more and more disinterested. It began to look a little bit too much like a reskinned Call of Duty for me. Granted, Respawn had added the Titans, which added something interesting and new to the gameplay, shaking up the formula a little bit. However, the infantry gameplay looked like a sci-fi Call of Duty. And honestly, if I wanted that, I would go play Crysis. At least Crytek tried to shake up the gameplay formula with numerous armor abilities in that game. At this point, I’m just so burnt out with that style of first person shooter. Even a game like Far Cry 3, which I loved, lost points in my book for the gameplay, because it’s so overused, and, as a result, it loses it’s fun. The reason that a game like Halo is still fun today is because they use a gameplay formula that is pretty much exclusive to the franchise, and that’s part of why I love it. With Titanfall, Respawn easily could have done something similar. Despite claims to the contrary, I doubt that Titanfall’s gameplay will differ all that much from other first person shooters.
The real kicker for me, though, was when I found out that Titanfall was a fully priced game (which means $59.99 in the US, and about 18-20 Kuwaiti Dinar where I love, which ends up close to $70.00) rather than a marked down one. Did I expect it to be free to play? No, not at all. The potential is definitely there for that to happen in the future, and do something similar to what Valve did with Team Fortress 2, but that’s a completely different argument. Titanfall is a multiplayer game. It only has multi player modes, and the lack of any word on split screen makes leads me to believe that there won’t be any, unfortunately. Since Titanfall is an Xbox exclusive, in order to actually do anything with the game, I’ll need to be paying for an Xbox Live Gold subscription, which is another 49.99. So essentially, I’ll have to pay around $100.00 to actually be able to play this game. When my Gold subscription runs out, I usually don’t renew for three to four months, simply because there is so much gaming I can do without going online, and I’m currently in one of those periods, and I don’t see me leaving it any time soon.
Really, the fact that it’s a fully priced game presents two problems. First, it’s pretty obvious that this game is over priced, and that’s a fairly simple issue. $59.99 is a little steep for a game that only has online play modes. But what about the gamers who want to play offline? I’ve been told on numerous occasions to just shut up about this issue because I OBVIOUSLY spend most of my gaming time online anyways, and ALL gamers pretty much play only online games, but that’s just untrue. There’s a whole sect of gamers that prefers to game offline, and wants a game to tell a narrative that has the player invested in what’s going on in the game. I just don’t feel that there’s enough here for Respawn to justify slapping a $59.99 price tag on the game. Of course, this decision was likely made by EA, being the corporate giant that they are. Even in that course, there’s not enough content to justify EA putting a that absurd price tag on this game.
Furthermore: Who’s developing the Xbox 360 version of the game? All that we’ve seen so far is gameplay on the Xbox One version of the game, and Respawn is keeping their mouths shut on who the Xbox 360 developer is. Sure, they were “handpicked” by Respawn, but does that really mean anything? Respawn hasn’t established themselves as a studio. They haven’t even put a game out yet, and we’re trusting the creators behind Call of Duty with a “handpicked” developer for this game? Obviously the goal of Titanfall is going to be selling Xbox Ones, since it is an exclusive, so the Xbox One version is definitely the version that Respawn is going to be pushing. However, that doesn’t mean that Xbox 360 gamers aren’t important. Despite the fact that there were 3 million Xbox Ones sold in less than two months, I would bet money that most gamers haven’t switched over to what I guess we can now call current gen.
It seems that my worst fears about Respawn turned out to be true.
