Titanfall has been in the works for three years, but its roots run much deeper. The engineers didn't have to debate 30fps vs 60fps, for example: they knew they would run at 60 before they even had a company.
So much is like this. The eponymous titans are the same. Huge, robotic exoskeletons that you stomp around in, they're new and entertaining by default, but they're also full of little touches that have been obsessed over. The way you strap into a titan has already had its fair share of eulogies, but I love the way it changes depending on the angle you arrive - from in front, behind, above. Sometimes the titan grabs you out of the air to haul you inside. Once you're in there, you see the whole level differently and realise that, as tight and coherent as it felt at ground level, it's also been made just for you at this scale too. No double-jump here, though - instead you have a thruster-powered double dash.
It's another fine detail, and there's an attention to those details at work here that can't be ignored. It speaks to a studio looking forwards, not backwards, eager to break the chains of the blockbuster it created. The titans are a great example of this, too, because everyone gets a go. You don't have to play well to unlock one; there's a countdown running for each player, and playing well just shaves time off the clock. Hiding your game's best toys behind kill-streaks suddenly feels very antiquated.
Respawn makes big stuff like this look so effortless, even as your titans dance around the corpses of all those sacred FPS cows that were still ripe for milking, and after a while there's a swagger to this game that might seem arrogant if you couldn't sense just how hard it has been to earn. Having spent years working on a series where people send you death threats when you rebalance the weapons, Respawn gives players a gun that locks on for headshots? But hey, screw the haters. When they stop using the smart pistol, the rest of us can climb around rooftops killing them with it as they fumble with their sniper scopes.
Titanfall's attitude to death and loss are just as refreshing. Titan on the way out? Eject and live to fight another day. Team lost? Let's have a mad race to the extraction point, during which you can reap a little revenge. The game modes still have a ring of familiarity to them, but once you hit the battlefield you'd struggle to trace the same outline in any of the games Titanfall is challenging. Where else are the windows suddenly the most dangerous entry points, because who's going to use the door when they can fly through a window?
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