Losing The Plot: Titanfall’s Greatest Missed Opportunities

When I first played Titanfall at Gamescom last year, it was quite obvious to me that Respawn were onto something quite worthy of the hype. Their game had a compelling nucleus of multiplayer gameplay that has held true all the way through to release.

Although that gameplay made the game worthy of the hype it generated and the praise it has drawn in reviews, it’s not without flaws. Many people will have focussed on the simplistic AI, the 6 vs. 6 multiplayer limit, the sub-1080p resolution on Xbox One or the general lack of lustre to the graphics that the Source engine is able to push, but my to my mind, the greatest flaw comes from my time with it at Gamescom.

Though I played the same short multiplayer match twice, it was prefaced by a cutscene that held over to the main game, ahead of the Militia’s level in Angel City. The guys from Respawn were understandably tight-lipped at that point, but the implication was clear: this would be a purely competitive online game with a story. I was fascinated and intrigued by the idea.

In recent years, Borderlands 2 was almost universally praised for its characters and story, while the announcement and reveal of Destiny promised to bring Bungie’s brand of Sci-Fi to a more dynamic co-op MMORPG. Except that these are both co-operative games, where setting objectives is easy, where success can be guaranteed and missions retried. In a competitive multiplayer game you will inevitably find yourself on the losing team at some point, and that’s something which Titanfall could have played upon, but didn’t.

The online campaign in the game presents both sides of a brief campaign in a larger war. It sees you play the same missions through twice, once as the IMC and the Militia, with briefings coming from NPC characters as you wait in the lobby, brief cutscenes (during which you can look around you) leading into the warzone, and comms chatter unfolding further plot points as you fight.

There’s a decent enough story and sci-fi universe story built by these moments, but it clearly draws on similar motifs to those in other fiction – there’s some noticeable parallels to the fiction behind Killzone, for example – but by fighting from both sides you get to see the motivations and justifications of each. Finishing one thread of the story leaves you with one idea and impression, but then experiencing the same events again with a different point of view lets them subtly defy those expectations.

But at no point do you really feel like you’re taking part in the events that unfold, and it’s very easy to miss the audio cues, fail to pay attention to the postage stamp-sized videos in the corner and lose track of what’s going on. Every pivotal moment occurs off camera as you are engaged in a round of Attrition or Hardpoint Domination, and though the dialogue shifts whether you win or lose, your performance doesn’t alter the next match in the slightest.

For me, this ultimately hurt the story. As a visual medium, being able to show events unfolding is an integral part of storytelling within console games – just think of the powerful and emotional prologue to The Last of Us – but Titanfall’s campaign very rarely does more than tell you what’s going on, simply because you are never actively engaged.

Admittedly, this is partly down to the dearth of game modes available. Attrition and Hardpoint can only paint certain scenarios, but with redressed or reimagined variations on Capture The Flag, Last Titan Standing and some form of attack/defence objective game modes, Respawn could have found ways to find a more integral role in the plot for you and your team to play. You wouldn’t be the distraction anymore, but the crack team sent in to destroy a vital military objective as the battle rages elsewhere, the handful of Pilots entrusted with the Militia’s last few Titans or those entrusted with the dangerous scrabble over an important resource.

Even then, what would happen when you lose a match? The story in Titanfall just progresses along its set path regardless, with all the linearity that is decried of the Call of Duty games from which Respawn came.

Yet it could have been altogether more complex. The binary nature of a round’s result would have been enough to serve for a branching story line that actually changes the nature of the next round, the dialogue and the story that surrounds it. Win or lose, you’re sent off down different tracks, culminating in several different endings.

The possibilities expand exponentially once you realise that not everyone in a given lobby has to be at the same stage of their story at the same time. In fact, there’s no reason why your teammates couldn’t be playing the IMC campaign as you play the Militia, a trick which has been used in the past to avoid controversies within modern war settings. The game could tailor the story’s trappings to your particular position, even offering individual or team side objectives to try and complete as you play, like hunting down enemy pilots, diminishing enemy Spectre forces or testing a new and experimental weapon part.

But perhaps I should have tempered my expectations and disappointment at the lack of ambition in the campaign, when it was evident elsewhere. Respawn are still a small and relatively new team, and while they’ve been working on Titanfall since 2010, this is the first entry in a new franchise, with a unique online infrastructure required and a difficult set of gameplay elements to blend into something cohesive.

Even though the single player is often derided in other multiplayer focused games, it was still a bold but logical move to cast it aside and focus all their efforts on the multiplayer. At the same time it was still important for them to at least try and introduce people to a universe and a conflict, and no matter how superficial, the multiplayer campaign does just that. When the time is right to move development to a sequel, and there will surely be a sequel, Titanfall has the foundations for Respawn to build and create something more adventurous.

In the meantime, I’d just be happy with a few more game modes.