This game just gets better the more you play it, I’m finding. The skill cap seems quite high, as the different mechs are deeper than I originally realized. There is really a lot of stuff you can do.
Also, I think Respawn really deserves credit for what they’ve done, which is seemingly in direct contrast to everything that every other damn developer is doing in shooters.
There’s no micro transaction bullshit (ah, actually, I guess there are optional cosmetic skins you can buy, but which have no impact on anything). All the DLC is free for everyone, with no “season pass” garbage, so when new maps show up they are immediately in rotation for everyone. The trend of paid multiplayer content has always been total garbage fuckery, because it not only screws folks who don’t buy the new stuff, but it screws the folks who DO pay for it, since it always means that new content exists in a segregated part of the community, and can’t be fully used.
Oh, and there’s no fucking random gambling boxes which are in every god damn game now, and are fucking stupid as fuck.
Respawn really deserves credit for this game. It deserves to be played, because we should be demanding more games like this.
I feel bad for Respawn. As far as the game design and execution, I think they did everything right. The single player is great. It changes things up enough to stay fresh, but doesn’t insert any crazy bullshit like an RTS section or pipe-sliding puzzles to inflate the experience. Multiplayer is fast, but tactically fulfilling. Movement is just about perfect. Gunplay is spot on. Like @Timex, I love the move away from loot boxes or season pass segregation. If someone wants to support this with cosmetic DLC, that’s exactly what they can do, no fooling around with RNG shenanigans. It’s just a direct purchase.
Unfortunately, I think this is the last gasp of a dying breed for AAA shooters. Loot boxes and “fee-to-pay” is the way to max revenue and I’m pretty sure Titanfall 2’s lower than expected sales, and Overwatch’s blowout numbers, are the lesson publishers take away from all this.
Well, that’s why folks need to buy this game and support this.
If this is what we want to see in our shooters, and I think it is (it is for me at least), then we need to make sure they make money on it even if they don’t have the massive marketing machinery of Blizzard.
I’ve got COD:IW, BF1… played them both quite a lot, before getting TF2. I actually only got TF2, because a buddy got it as part of a bundle on the PS4 store, and so I was like, “What the hell, I’ll try it.”
But it’s easily the best shooter I’ve played this generation, bar none. One of the best I’ve played ever… and I almost didn’t play it at all, because I didn’t know about it.
Even then, I don’t think publishers will support this generous model going forward. I think they’ve mostly wised up to the fact that segregating map packs just builds resentment and punishes the buyers. (Even DICE and EA admit they’re taking a hard look at this for the future of Battlefield/Battlefront.) Loot boxes, and all of its inherent gambling attraction, is a massive success. And people love them. They think nothing of grinding or dropping $10 for a few extra chances to pull the slot machine handle. They literally complain when they are denied the opportunity to buy more loot box tickets, as many did at the start of Battlefield 1 or the last couple Call of Duty games, before the publishers had flipped the switch to turn on the stores.
If you’re a publisher, the options are:
Give everything away = That’s a non-starter.
Sell season pass/map packs = DLC buyers stick to the one-third rule, and it makes matchmaking shitty.
Make maps and modes free, but sell cosmetics = Good, but now you’ve gone from one-third of people buying to even less. Also, cosmetic DLC purchases are finite.
Make maps and modes free, but sell loot boxes = Roll in the money. Gambling is addictive, and loot boxes offer infinite opportunities for purchasing. Maintain a critical mass of players and the only issue you’ll have is server uptimes.
Yeah, on Black Friday my Walmart was rolling in $27 Titanfall 2s. But I decided not to get it since I wasn’t ready to play it yet. But after Timex’s peptalk, I’ll buy it next time it’s $27 again.
That’s because it exploitative. There’s a market for it, just like there’s a market for buying lottery tickets.
But folks who aren’t directly appealed to by the gambling aspect of this, which I like to imagine is the majority of us, need to support folks like Respawn when they fight against the tide.
I’m glad my babbling convinced more folks to try this game… I honestly feel you’ll enjoy it (assuming you enjoy shooters at all, or giant robot games along the lines of Mechwarrior). But my motivations are purely selfish. I mean, while it’s cool if Respawn makes more money, my primary goal here is that I want them to make more games like this.
I wonder exactly how much of a success or failure Titanfall 2 is/was. AAA games run on money, obviously, and I really really don’t want publisher executives industry wide to use it as an example of 'don’t do what Respawn did, it obviously doesn’t shift copies… although, like telefrog brought up, it’s probably inherently true at this point.
Unfortunately, the only indication of player numbers (thus kinda sales) is found in the game by looking at the player count for each multiplayer mode. On PC, that count is fairly mediocre for a AAA shooter. It’s not terrible - you can easily get an Attrition or Mixtape match going with no issues at most times that I’ve seen - but other modes are practically dead. It is notably much lower than the player numbers for the first game on PC at or around launch.
The only point of comparison I can make is to compare the live Titanfall 2 numbers to Battlefield 1.
Obviously, that still wouldn’t get you the sales numbers for the folks that purchased Titanfall 2 strictly for the single player campaign. Then again, since we’re talking about the game’s sales relative to the recurring revenue scheme, it really doesn’t matter because presumably you wouldn’t be getting many cosmetic purchases from those people.
Ya, the sad thing is that EA put this up directly against BF1 and COD… and basically didn’t advertise it at all, while BF1 was shown non-stop on TV.
It really deserves more coverage, as I think it’s better than either of those games. And BF1 was also an awesome game.
Although, to be fair, my preference of TF2 is likely due to the fact that I’ve always preferred COD to BF.
But TF2 definitely shows that Respawn is made of the guys who invented Call of Duty, rather than the folks in charge of the COD franchise today. The way it plays demonstrates that its developers really understand shooters better than most.
I like it a lot. I don’t know if I like it better than BF1, but I definitely like it more than CoD: Infinite Warfare.
(As an aside, CoD:IW had a cracking good single player campaign as well. Better than I thought it would. Unfortunately, the MP is a terrible re-hash of Black Ops 3, but with a lot more loot box shenanigans.)
Titanfall 2 really got screwed by its lackluster marketing and crap launch window.
Ya, I think that between the two, a player is gonna like BF1 or TF2 based on where they fall on the BF/COD divide… But both are probably the best examples of their style thus far.
I honestly enjoyed COD:IW, and played it for a while… .but it was purely because I didn’t know about TF2. TF2 is a better game, imho.
This game is such a weird diamond in the rough in the AAA space. I think it’s one of the few games that I feel is somewhat justified in it’s budget, in that the movement mechanics rely on a level of polish that you simply wouldn’t get from an independent release. Speaking of, in an alternate universe where an indie studio did pull off an exact copy of this game, albeit with much lower graphical fidelity, the player-base would undoubtedly be even smaller, even at an indie price point. Or maybe the word of mouth buzz would be enough to sustain it? For the people in the thread who were/are holding off on it, is it the price tag, even at sale price, or is it mainly player-base worries?
I will back this 100%. Every now and then you get something indie like Reflex, Ratz Instagib, or the new Unreal Tournament that is all about core movement, but even then other aspects of the game suffer because of budget or matchmaking issues. For the most part, movement and snappy gunplay in indie shooters are janky as hell, which are the two things you can’t suck at in a multiplayer shooter. It just doesn’t work.
Just to help calm such fears, at least on the PS4, every game type seems tor result in finding matches in less than a minute. At no point am I ever stuck waiting around for a match.
I expect things may get even better with the new matchmaking UI.
For me, it’s the experience of playing the beta. It played very different from Titanfall 1.
Titanfall 1 experience:
Drop from dropship as a pilot, run around killing things, get a Titan to drop and follow you around (or hop into), eject when damage is low, and repeat.
Titanfall 2 beta experience
Run around and get killed repeatedly. Try to figure out how to use the new grappling hook. Get killed. Respawn. Get killed. Repeat.
So yeah, it was quite different. But maybe it was from being a beta, where they didn’t have matchmaking in place like in Titanfall 1?
I always preferred BF and played nearly every single one of them (BC2 and 2042 being my favourites), but BF1 left me cold. BF3 and BF4 were losing me due to the scale, I think. I just found them too clusterfucky and ultimately too similar to their predecessors. BF1, despite the setting and playing with my buddies for once, just solidified that sentiment.
TF2 on the other hand just straight up countered a lot of these feelings. It feels fresh and exciting, and, sure, you can die a lot too, but I find there’s practically no spawning killing, the matchmaking works well so most games are much closer and enjoyable for it, and the reduced team sizes means there’s some breathing room despite the breakneck pace. The grunts in Attrition and Bounty Hunt fill out the battlefield very nicely without ratcheting up the clusterfuck as well.
[quote]
Net sales for the quarter were $2.07 billion, a new record for the company. The outperformance versus our expectations was driven by Battlefield 1 and FIFA 17, offset by Titanfall 2.[/quote]
Normal-speak translation: “Titanfall 2 did not hit our sales expectations.”
