How Respawn crafted better mech combat and single-player play in Titanfall 2

GamesBeat: It’s interesting that you can do these missions with, essentially, a buddy. The Titan is your sidekick. You do the pilot’s thing while sending the Titan off in another direction. Do a lot of the single-player missions call for that?

McCoy: What we found during development is that the game starts feeling pretty one-note if you’re doing the same type of thing over and over. There’s a lot of variety. That level you’re playing in the reclamation facility, with the toxic sludge and stuff, you separate and go do pilot stuff by yourself for a bit to clear a path and meet back up with BT. Then you do BT stuff again.

I was worried, when we started doing this, that people would say, “Why would I ever not be with my Titan? That’s all I want to do, right?” In reality, it’s two games in one. While you do the pilot stuff, you tend not to think “I wish I had my Titan,” because you’re so engaged with the pilot stuff. Then you get the Titan back and it’s like, “Oh, right, I have an awesome Titan, let’s go blow stuff up!” After a while we give you more pilot stuff to do and it feels great. It has this cool multi-level loop of stuff going on.

GamesBeat: There’s a fair amount of overwhelming time pressure there, where I wasn’t quite sure what was most effective. Do my rockets do more damage than the cannon? I was looking around for ways to hide and protect myself, too, and not finding much.

Welch: We warped you into that part at the end there, yeah. Over the progression of the game you would have picked up a new weapon and learned and experimented.

McCoy: You have the vortex, too, which throws it back. All the loadouts have their offensive and defensive abilities. Some of them are going to be better-suited to certain scenarios than others.

Welch: There may not always be a “right” choice. It’s what’s comfortable for you, what you’ve learned and mastered. You can use your defensive skill set, your offensive skill set, the environment you have to maneuver in, and overcome.

McCoy: A lot of our weapons and Titans are born in multiplayer. They’re crafted in an environment where we need to maintain balance. It’s not like anything is under- or over-powered.

GamesBeat: Are there some Titans that are more brawlers, more melee-focused?

McCoy: There’s Ronin, a loadout for BT where he has a sword and a shotgun. He’s all about getting in the enemy’s face, doing a lot of damage, and backing out, because he doesn’t have a lot of health. He’s pretty low on shields. It’s all a matter of play style. If you want to stay back we have North Star, a sniper who can fly.

GamesBeat: Are all of the Titans analogous to human player classes that way?

McCoy: I don’t know about analogs. The reason we went to more character-based Titans is so we could craft bespoke weapons and abilities that synergized with each other. A good example would be Scorch, the fire Titan. He’s slow and lumbering, has a lot of health, but he’s good at zoning and area denial. He can throw out a gas canister that spews out flammable gas and light it on fire with his other weapons. He’s doing concentrated damage and almost corralling the other Titans. It’s all about different play styles in the archetypes.

GamesBeat: What’s the progression in multiplayer like?

McCoy: There’s a lot more stuff to earn and unlock. We have six Titans, a whole bunch more weapons, more abilities. We have the tactical kits with the grapple and the cloak and all those other crazy things. One of our big goals was to give people more things to master. The first game, like you said, you ended up defaulting to one little corner of the arsenal. One thing we didn’t do well, we didn’t expose every part of the game so people could feel like they could learn and get really good at all of it. That’s been a huge focus.

GamesBeat: Do you think there are Titans and play styles that are more for experts as opposed to less skilled players?

McCoy: Absolutely. I really enjoy the sniper. It’s the glass cannon. It requires decent teamwork, because the other Titans can help protect you with the particle shield and other ways of keeping enemies off you. North Star is a higher risk, higher reward class in multiplayer. I’d expect new players to get absolutely waxed their first couple times out. There’s a learning curve.

GamesBeat: Call of Duty is coming out not long after you guys. It’s doing some of the same science-fiction stuff, jumping and wall-running and big robots. Would you still say it’s obviously very different?

McCoy: I feel like our brand of first-person shooter in a sci-fi world stands alone right now. I’m not looking at other games and thinking, “They do that so much better than we do. They’ve cracked a problem that we couldn’t.”

I’ve played the Infinite Warfare beta. I played the Battlefield beta a bit. I played the new Destiny expansion. I feel like all these games have their own worlds that they inhabit. We’re trying to appeal to players that have a different desire from their games, from their sessions. I feel like our game has its own identity.

GamesBeat: It’s very speedy, but at the same time it’s almost chess-like.

McCoy: That’s the great thing about the Titans. It’s two games in one. The pilots have that fast, fluid, high lethality, super competitive side of the game. The Titans are slower-paced. You can think more, create strategies. When you play a game mode like Last Titan Standing, with round-based elimination, you almost get a Counter-Strike vibe. It’s all about sight lines and map control and friendlies and where you’re going. It lights up a totally different part of your brain compared to playing as a pilot.

That’s one place I think Titanfall stands apart. There’s a lot in this game to appeal to a lot of different types of people. It’s mixed in such a cool way that you don’t ever feel like you’re getting the short end of the stick from one part of the game or another.

GamesBeat: The batteries seem very different from the last game.

McCoy: Yeah, the battery’s a whole new mechanic.

GamesBeat: You can jump on someone and pull out their battery.

McCoy: It works a little different between single-player and multiplayer. We fudge some things for the sake of fun. In single-player you can just run over a battery and pick it up as a Titan. In multiplayer you have to rodeo on the back of an enemy Titan, rip out the battery, clamber on to a friendly, and pop it in to give them some health and shields. That was one of those efforts to encourage teamwork.

GamesBeat: It seems like it gives you more of a reason to jump on somebody.

McCoy: Yeah, you’re rewarded with more than just doing damage. You can help out your teammates.

GamesBeat: How did you think about creating the different environments?

McCoy: We went through a pretty lengthy prototyping phase. At the outset, Steve said he wanted a postcard game. He didn’t want a bunch of destroyed future space cities. He wanted beautiful vistas, actual beauty in the world of Titanfall. That was the first direction.

Something we tried to do — especially in multiplayer, but it also applies to single-player — is create less visually noisy environments. That’s for gameplay’s sake. It’s harder to pick out enemies when there’s gack all over the walls. It’s hard to wall-run and all these other things. Without sacrificing fidelity, we wanted to reduce that noise. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. You can tell an artist, “Just don’t put so much stuff in the scene,” but they can’t stop themselves.

GamesBeat: Are there some multiplayer levels that feel more like arenas, as opposed to single-player maps?

McCoy: We try to create authentic environments. Some of the multiplayer maps share a location with single-player. It’s not as if we’ve taken geometry and copied it, but you’ll be like, “Oh, I remember this style of architecture. This must be in that same base.”

One thing we strived for — not just in environment design, but also in weapons and Titans and everything else — is that feeling of authenticity. Not realism, obviously. This isn’t real. But we want people to be able to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves. You feel like this all could be real in this world. It’s internally consistent and coherent.

GamesBeat: I was shocked to get killed by a grunt.

McCoy: Yeah, they were pretty harsh on you in Blood and Rust.

Welch: That’s one section where they’re particularly brutal. I don’t know why.

GamesBeat: Did you change them up with that in mind?

McCoy: Our AI got a huge amount of work for this game. In single-player we had to create a bunch of new AI types and routines and things for them to do, so they could cope with a player that’s so mobile and lethal. Also, with all the new Titans and things they can do, we had to create AI types that played to their strengths. The Ronin Titan, the brawler, his AI will try to get close to you and deal some damage, then pull back to get some cover. He’ll hunt for a battery and then come back.

The AI Titans in the first game were fairly rudimentary. When we shipped the game, they could only use the vortex shield. They couldn’t use any of the other off-hand abilities. Now they can use the full range of what’s available to them.

GamesBeat: When I watched a lot of top Black Ops III players, they were always rounding corners in flight. They’d jump up high and use the verticality to surprise somebody who isn’t looking up. That seemed to separate the stronger players from weaker ones. Is that something you see in your games as well? The people who master moving in the air are more successful?

McCoy: Absolutely. There’s a huge gulf of skill between players who stay on the ground versus the ones who can manipulate the environment. That’s one of the goals in single-player, to get people comfortable doing that. Not only are you more capable, but it’s more fun once you get comfortable with that. Just walking on the ground — it’s like when you’re a kid wearing water wings in the pool. It’s fun, but you’re not swimming yet. We want everyone to learn to swim.

GamesBeat: It’s like Spock’s line in Wrath of Khan about two-dimensional thinking.

McCoy: [laughs] Yeah, three-dimensional thinking is definitely a Titanfall thing. We’ve seen people who — it takes them a while. They’ll keep running on the ground. But then they start to see everyone around them running up the walls, and the lightbulb goes off. They can finally start playing Titanfall. There’s always that moment in focus tests. Right, there it is, now they’re playing Titanfall.

If you’re a new player, single-player is definitely a good starting place. It’s not going to make you an esports pro, but it’s a starting place. It gives you a foundation to build on.

GamesBeat: What was the development cycle like this time? You didn’t have to found a new company at the same time.

Welch: Or deal with a lawsuit.

McCoy: It was harder in some ways and easier in lots of others. It was harder in that we had a two-year cycle to iterate on what I’d call a proof of concept for multiplayer and turn it into a fleshed-out game. But we also had to invent single-player from the start, which was — we thought it would be hard, and it was even harder. It was almost a non-starter. There were times where I thought we couldn’t reconcile it all.

I’m surprised at the result. I don’t think anyone expected it to be the game that it is, as far as single-player. It’s not what we had in our mind’s eye two years ago. But it’s so much better.

Welch: What I hear the team talk about most is they’re more proud of making this game than they are of Modern Warfare. It’s shocking for me, because I was at Activision in publishing at the time. To hear the guys who made MW saying they’re more proud of this game, it speaks volumes. Do I expect it to perform in a similar way? We’ll see. But hearing them talk about how they got to make this game and how polished it is, it’s amazing.

GamesBeat: What do you think about the whole variety out this year? World War I, World War II, modern-day, science fiction.

McCoy: It’s great. If anything’s been proven, it’s that genre or time period or whatever you want to call it, it doesn’t really matter. You make a good game and people show up. That’s been our philosophy from the start. When we started on the original Titanfall, modern-day combat was the only thing you were supposed to do. That was the popular theory, the conventional wisdom. If you want to be successful you make a modern military shooter. Sci-fi is going to limit you.

The reality is, if you make something you like and enjoy, people will enjoy it with you.

Welch: You can be the first to do World War I and do it really well and people will show up.

GamesBeat: The Civil War’s waiting.

Welch: Well, you can go too far.

GamesBeat: Call of Duty Roman Wars was the big rumor.

Welch: Dinosaurs. Who knows?

McCoy: Ark, that indie game about survival, yeah. Go for it. Anything is possible with great gameplay. I love that people are willing to take more risks now.