The good and bad of Titanfall 2: maps and game modes
In case you missed it, Respawn Entertainment has put out pre-Alpha Tech Tests over the past two weekends for their upcoming sci-fi first person shooter, Titanfall 2. It’s one of my most anticipated releases for this coming autumn as I am a huge fan of the original, released as an Xbox exclusive back in 2014. The technical test was an opportunity for Respawn to stress-test their servers and see how the game plays in real time with real people. So what do we think of it so far?
Over the course of the two weekends we were shown three maps, each one was very different and lent themselves to different styles of play. Homestead was the largest map, with huge open areas for Titans to fight in, with very little structure for pilots to wall run on. Boomtown in contrast was a much tighter, smaller map with lots of structures that allow for wall running. When your Titan is eventually called in, battles on this map are usually quite short lived and hectic as there isn’t a great deal of room for them to manoeuvre. The third map seemed to be a mixture of the two elements, large enough for Titans and small enough for pilot movement. It was encouraging to see these three different maps, and it will be interesting to see what the other ones are shipped with the full game.
In terms of game types, we were given three choices. Amped Hardpoint, one of my favourite modes from the original, Pilot v Pilot, the renamed Pilot Hunter and a new mode called Bounty Hunt. Amped Hardpoint is essentially a capture the control points mode with three points to capture on the map. Capturing the points will score a bonus for your team, but if you can stay on the point and “amp” it, you can gain an x2 multiplier for your team. It’s a good addition and rewards teams that are focused specifically on the objectives rather than just those intent on racking up as many kills as they can. The mode is 6v6 with Titans permitted so about midway through a match you can start to see the tide of battle change depending on the teams that have managed to get their Titans built faster.
Pilot v Pilot is a simple team death match style mode with no Titans to call, and is an 8v8 match, which feels like a bit of a misstep. The original Pilot Hunter was so named because the maps were populated with the AI soldiers, meaning the enemy players were difficult to find. Teams only scored points if a Pilot was killed, not the AI. Although not my preferred mode, it was good distraction now and again as the proliferation of AI made the maps feel full and alive, and you could still call in your Titan. Not so in Pilot v Pilot. Firstly the maps they showed are too big for this mode, even with the slightly increased player count. There are huge amounts of time just running around the map trying to find enemy players. In the games I played most players were located at the very fringes of the map sniping into the central area. For a game that is wholly about the movement and the joy that it brings as well as the spectacle of the Titans, it makes the game incredibly dull to find players sat still aiming down sights.
The mode seems to be trying to appeal specifically to the Call of Duty type player; however as a direction for Titanfall 2 to go down, it concerns me greatly. The original Titanfall was good precisely because it wasn’t trying to be a CoD clone; you had huge arenas populated with AI that made you feel like you were involved in a conflict on a large scale. Shooting the AI gave you a small amount of score XP which helped reduce the time of your Titan build or give you something to keep you busy while looking for the enemy pilots. In this mode we now have barren maps with everyone dispersed at the edges playing cagey sniper battles – it’s not fun. Furthermore, Call of Duty has changed over the years with maps getting increasingly smaller as players want to be shooting something within a few seconds of spawning; Titanfall 2 fails in that expectation so will not appeal to that type of player.
The third mode on offer was Bounty Hunt. It’s the mode that seems to be a mixture of Attrition and the co-operative mode Frontier Defence from the original game. Bounty Hunt is a competitive mode, with two teams facing off against each other, completing challenges during waves to collect a bounty that needs to be deposited in a bank at the end of each wave in order to score. The mode features the AI that players will be familiar with and shooting these as well as enemy players will drop loot also that can be collected to be deposited. Waves can also contain specific large bounties such as a Titan that is spawned that both teams try to destroy first for a huge boost in their score. Bounties can be stolen from enemy players if you manage to shoot them during the wave and before they manage to bank it in one of the two locations in the map so at times it can be a cagey run back to the nearest bank particularly if the enemy has set up a blockade with a Titan. It’s a fun mode and I look forward to seeing more of it in the final game.
