Titanfall 2 - Maybe this time it will retain players?

Yeah, I ended up skipping TF2 for this reason. It was pretty clear to me in the beta that I wasn’t up to the task. Hope you sort it out though!

I spent about 2 hours on T2’s multiplayer, mostly played the “bonus bank” mode and attrition, got the achievements, got to “middle of the pack” status and then took a break.

Then I got the idea to play some original Titanfall since it was on my hard drive and I had EA access. I leveled a character from 1 to 25, mostly on attrition and campaign, which is a mix of attrition and control points.

What I learned:

  • Find a gun that suits your play style, for me that was the auto carbine and the EVA-8 shotgun.
  • You will be underpowered to start out, and need to learn the maps and earn the unlocks. Dues must be paid. Play in off-peak times if you want to avoid the guys who really know their shit and roll over noobs for fun.
  • The game will punish you for stand-and-bang gameplay, both as a pilot and as a titan. Stick and move. Hanging around in one place will get you smacked down. Not evading fire and going head-on with a titan against another titan will get you to doomed very quickly. Manage cooldowns, use shields, learn to dodge and use cover.
  • Titans against pilots is unfair, use that to your advantage. Shoot them, melee them when they jump near you, step on them. Free points for your side. If you must titan hunt as a pilot (and I’m hard-headed enough to try), make sure you don’t shoot from the same place twice, or make sure your target is engaged with another titan and too busy to deal with you. By the third shot, assume an enemy pilot is on his way to stomp you.
  • Notice how experienced players prefer to stick around each other in their titans to outnumber lone-wolf opponents. Unbalanced fights are very much in the bigger side’s favor. If you find yourself losing a lot to a certain tactic, consider adopting that tactic.
  • In attrition and bonus bank modes, the minions are worth plenty of points if you take the time to kill them, especially in a quick-moving titan. Dashing your titan to auto-squish a couple of 3-man squads of sentinels (one per) is more points than a pilot kill (four). MVPs usually have plenty of minion kills as well as pilot and titan kills.
  • Stick and move gameplay will also reduce your deaths, which reduces your contribution to the other side’s totals. Don’t underestimate the value of dying only four times (+16 to the other side) as opposed to 10 times (+40) to the other side. That could be the margin of victory. Any means of denying points is strategically useful, even if it doesn’t make you feel like a badass.
  • Stealth works, remember to use the cloak if you choose to equip it. Hiding in a good corner near a control point or a high-traffic part of the map can be effective.

Yeah I’m going to play more Bounty and Hard Point modes for now instead of Attrition. My basic problem now is that my aim just sucks. No amount of strategy will fix that. So I’ll play those other modes as I improve my aim in the meantime.

I am nowhere near as good as my kids at Titanfall, but watching my oldest play, the thing that made him badass was the speed at which he did nearly everything. He never stopped moving as a pilot and would be first to fire in almost every encounter with an enemy pilot. Push yourself to be faster in everything. It may take your out of your comfort zone, but you will get better.

He also wasn’t as good as me in a Titan. I think that was because with Titans you have more time to strategize. Your time to eject is a lot longer than your time to die as a pilot. I was better in a fight than him, but he always got the jump on the other guy while playing as a pilot.

Anyway, the new game rewards skill like the first did IMO. Just push yourself to work faster and yeah, pick the guns that suit your playstyle. Always be moving. Titanfall is a kinetic game.

“We think there’s really three types of players,” Wilson said. "People that really love Battlefield and that kind of big strategic gameplay that will orient in that direction; the player that loves the fast, fluid, kinetic gameplay of Titanfall 2 that really orient in that direction; and the player that just has to play the two greatest shooters this year and will buy both.

I did a liiiittle bit better last night. Some things I adjusted…

-Look at the mini-map more. I’ve been heavy into Overwatch for a good chunk of this year and there’s no radar in that game. This got me into a bad habit of just running around until I see/hear someone to shoot. In TF2, the maps are so large in comparison that this doesn’t work AT ALL. I was running around aimlessly, begging to be shot in the back by someone who got the jump on me. The mini-map is a big deal in this game and it pays to take a glance at it when you’re running around wondering where to go.

-Stick and move. RichH gave the tip above and it has proven helpful. I’m trying to be more aware that every shot I take will potentially draw enemies to my location, and that I need to stay mobile to obscure my position. If I don’t succeed in killing with my first volley of shots, I’ve been trying to move around to another location and try again. Same with fighting Titans as a pilot. Take some shots at them from one location and unless they’re already heavily distracted, it’s best to move to another position to take more shots.

-Titans stick together. Never deploy my Titan when the rest of the team doesn’t have one, and don’t run around lone wolf with a titan. A 1v1 Titan battle (unless the other titan is near death) is going to get you heavily damaged in the best case scenario, and more likely dead.

If you want to force yourself to habitually notice/rely on UI and/or map indicators more, play with the sound off for a while. This does wonders for me when I’m trying to do a little bit of muscle-memory and awareness programming in this (and other) games.

Did something change with wall running, I am absolute shit at it now. Its like things I think I can hop off of and towards other things to keep the wall running going, are just too far apart even with the double jump.

So I am cheesing it now and using corner camping/cloaking for the stealth kills. :p

I don’t know if the mechanics themselves changed (except that we no longer have the TF1 parkour kit for extra bonuses here), but there are several places where shit is too far apart to maintain momentum (wider lanes to accomodate more Titans now days or what? I don’t know the reasoning). As soon as you double-jump you lose boosted momentum. A better option in these areas is actually to land->crouchslide->jump in quick succession.

It will take a little practice, but slide-jumping maintains and boosts your extra speed gained from parkour for exactly one bounce before getting gradually more penalized for over-use. You can’t do this multiple time in succession or you’ll suffer a movement penalty. You’ll have to alternate between floors and walls in places where your only other option is double-jumping gaps if you want to maintain your extra speed.

Edit: I think this guy has a better undetstanding of this stuff than I do, so here’s his short explanation. What I called slide-jumping he calls bunnyhopping, for clarity:

I made a bunch of changes yesterday and suddenly started doing a whole lot better. I’m sure lots of it is placebo and luck, but here it goes anyway:

  • I tweaked my controller sensitivity options. In the campaign I had it set to one notch above default, but that was just too much for multiplayer. I changed it back to default which seemed to help my accuracy.

  • I changed the sensitivity curve setting. Instead of the default setting, I’m using the “steady” setting instead…I think that’s what it’s called.

  • I turned off the controller deadzone to help me be more precise

  • I carefully worked through my loadouts to pick better weapons which suit me. I’m mostly using SMGs and Shotguns for now. And after using the SMG for 20-30 minutes I unlocked the add-on which lets you shoot while you’re running - what previously killed me was the delay between stopping running and shooting. Combined with the boost ability which makes you run twice as fast, this is really deadly

  • I changed my anti-titan weapon to be the magnetic grenades instead of the hitscan laser. It lets you shoot titans from behind cover, it’s pretty powerful - especially when your weapons are amped - and its range is still really far.

  • Like the above, I won’t drop my titan by itself. But more than that, I focus on rodeoing opponent titans whenever the opportunity presents itself so I can steal a battery. This is regardless of whether I currently have a titan. Then I can either give that battery to a teammate’s titan or my own titan once I do have one. If the guy has electric smoke, just hop off immediately.

  • Join a popular network like the Giant Bombcast or similar, and use the Network functions to join games with other people in the network. Even if you don’t talk to them while playing, it’s still fun to be on the same team with a bunch of others you joined the game with.

Finished the campaign. Incredibly entertaining! I want more!

I am absolutely LOVING the Titanfall 2 campaign! I am sensing a love letter to Half Life 2 woven throughout which is a nice bonus.

Also this:

As much as I liked the campaign, I’m disliking the multiplayer just as much. I’m teetering on the edge of abandoning it. It just doesn’t feel right. The weapons don’t feel good, the maps aren’t great, and I hate how the firefights only last a fraction of a second before somebody dies. Piloting TItans is fun, but I don’t enjoy how completely insignificant I feel as a pilot against a team full of Titans .

I’ve been slowly playing through and savoring every moment of the campaign.

Last night I played the factory assembly level. That may be one of the most memorable, and one of my favorite, FPS campaign levels in the history of gaming. That experience is going to live with me and I can see myself replaying this campaign. So nice to see ReSpawn’s single player concepts and execution after all these years.

The factory assembly level was also my favorite.

(Until I played the rest of the campaign)

[quote]
Last week, Respawn’s second game launched. By some estimates, Titanfall 2 sold only a quarter of what its predecessor managed, despite launching on more platforms in a market with vastly higher installed base than existed for the original Titanfall (which was itself somewhat overshadowed by Bungie’s Destiny). It’s a hugely disappointing performance for a game from such an accomplished studio. While sales of the original Titanfall didn’t set the world alight, the performance of Titanfall 2 - barring miraculous recovery in the next few weeks - is quite likely the death knell for the budding franchise, and the first commercial failure that West and Zampella have presided over since the turn of the millennium.[/quote]

I wonder if EA was making a power-play trying to cannibalize sales of a potentially weaker COD offering this year. They underestimated the stubbornness of the COD playerbase though and in turn Battlefield 1 and Infinite Warfare cannibalized Titanfall 2. Newer CODs all borrow the movement and sci-fi weaponry from Titanfall already so Titanfall doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself for the tastes of veteran COD players.

Even if you are a voracious FPS consumer, how many titles can one pick up in a roughly 2-week period?

This is me. I love shooters, but I could only justify getting one mainline shooter this season. I know eventually I’ll pick up Titanfall 2 and CoD up later, if only to play the campaigns, but I couldn’t get all three. Especially not when they’re all asking for full retail price buy-in.

Word of mouth is tremendously good for Titanfall 2, so let’s hope it has long legs.

That said, the first one shipped in a dead time for consoles and PCs. In March of 2015, people were starved for anything on Xbox One. Titanfall 2 should have been a Spring 2017 release.

What matters to me is simply whether the community sticks around to enable me to continue playing games.

Even with the original Titanfall and its dwindling and fragmented user base thanks to a terrible DLC model, I was still able to regularly find games on Xbox One. I’m in the US, so it was probably much worse for people in other countries though.

Titanfall 2’s community on Xbox One is pretty big from what I can tell - 20,000+ concurrent players every day, which is bigger than many popular shooters. Word of mouth and the holidays will undoubtedly increase that. And then their free DLC model will prevent fragmentation of the community. Even better if they improve the configuration of current playlists to consolidate things. So I’m not really concerned about personally being able to find games.