E3 2013 – Titanfall Preview

Titanfall is truly impressive. We saw a demo during the EA press conference and over on the booth, Steve Fukuda, game director at Respawn Entertainment played through a full match. “The game does take place at small scale between the pilots who are very highly agile and mobile” said Fukuda, “and large scale between the titans themselves, these large, fast, agile machines.” I guess everyone is agile, then.

As a squashy pilot, you drop into the battlefield and fight over control points and other such targets. Pilots are indeed extremely agile, bouncing from rooftop to rooftop, wall-running across buildings and boosting off pillars to scale those hard-to-reach platforms. They’ll need to be nimble, with the huge titans clomping their way around the land, each mechanised foot capable of reducing a pilot to mush.

To stay out of the way, you’ll be able to hitch a ride on your teammate’s titans, clinging to their necks and shooting enemies that the behemoths may not be able to see. If you prefer, you can rodeo your enemies’ titans, ripping open their headplates and filling their mechanisms with lead. We saw pilots using smart pistols that lock onto their targets, as well as the more typical Sidewinder rifle and Archer AT-Rockets.

The titans we saw took 90 seconds to be built on the drop ships, during which pilots are left to race about the landscape without fear of being crushed. Once the titan is built, it can be called in and dropped to the ground from orbit in spectacular fashion. These giant mechs have a much more impressive array of weaponry. Yes you have your traditional rockets and miniguns but there’s also the vortex blocker and the arc cannons. Arc cannons are particularly brutal, shooting bolts of electricity that can temporarily disable a rival titan or kill a pilot in a gruesomely meaty explosion.

You’ll need to leave your titan suit to take capture points. While you’re venturing about indoors to keep the point clear, you can put your titan on autopilot. It won’t move around but it will scan the surrounding area and shoot any targets within range, picking up extra XP for you and providing plenty of warning that enemies are nearby.

Both player modes looked very manoeuvrable, with advantages and disadvantages to each. Replay have worked hard to balance the two styles of play and it seems to me that they’ve done a hell of a job.

Titanfall will be coming to Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC in 2014.