Limit the Titans
This sounds like a very weird request, admittedly. The whole point of Titanfall is that you can summon a giant robot to turn the tide of battle, yes. After all, they feature pretty heavily in the marketing, and the game is literally named after them. But hear us out.
There’s nothing wrong with a shooter that just wants to offer the player endless action for 4-10 hours (see: the new Doom), admittedly. And having giant robots at your disposal all the time is pretty cool, but if the whole campaign is just “on foot, on foot, parkour, robots-robots-robots”, the feeling of power you get when you summon a Titan could diminish if you’re doing it every five minutes.
Perhaps missions where you can’t use a Titan at all would help mix things up and not feel like one long haze of destruction. Say, the enemy will hack your Titan to fight for their side if you try to summon it, for example. One thing that would help is if the campaign missions limited the Titans you can use depending on the level or the objective. Or if a mission requires you to provide heavy fire or defend your faction from an incoming assault, the Ogre or Atlas would be the only two available to choose from while the Strider sits this mission out, for example.
Have Some Legs
These days, shooter campaigns are fairly short. Some only clock in at barely 5 hours, and it’s rare for one to hit 8 or more. This is fine on a case by case basis–multiple games are guilty of stretching themselves out too long, but it’s also disappointing when a game is using marketing that clearly shows single player footage and has big name voices attached to it, and is over in the blink of an eye. With games these days being $60, that’s just downright criminal.
Titanfall 2’s campaign doesn’t need to be The Witcher 3 levels of long, as arduous as that sounds, but it should still be a decent length. Not too short to feel like a pointless slog, but also long enough to be something worth talking about. At the very least, it shouldn’t feel like it’s just taking the player through a series of bot matches that just happen to have some writing of debatable quality attached to it.
What could help is if the sequel took the two campaign concept from the original and made them into actual stories. If you played Transformers: War for Cybertron, you’ll remember that the game had separate campaigns for the Autobots and Decepticons, described by the developers at the time as stories of “hope and power”, respectively. The IMC campaign could be about rising to power years before the war begins, while the Militia campaign can be about their origins and gaining Titans of their own. With enough missions, it could be a gripping story fit to deliver some thrills and give nuance to this battle.
Open Your Mind
It’s been a complaint of shooters of the past five or so years that they guide along a narrow corridor too much and don’t offer much in the way of variety. You just go one way, take down some bad guys, repeat. Another is that missions are just like going down a checklist, which isn’t much fun.
Titanfall 2 doesn’t need an open world in the style of say, Assassin’s Creed or GTA, but missions should take some ideas from them to heart. The AC games give players optional objectives during missions that can help lead to a full 100% synchronization. Ideally, Respawn would look at those and go, “let’s do that, but with giant robots”.
Optional objectives during robot warfare missions would add replayability to the campaign, whether that be sabotaging enemy Titans for the next mission or securing parts to upgrade Titans on your side. Other games, such as Infamous, have stunts that you can do; “headshot an enemy in midair”, that sort of thing. This sort of metagame would be fun in Titanfall 2. The game could ask you to wallrun onto a Titan, disable it, then gun down an AI enemy for an XP boost. There’s always a way to add some more fun to a campaign.
The Friends Who Titanfall 2 Together…
Single player is all well and good, but there’s no denying the fun that comes with tackling campaign missions together. Games are, much like drinking, cards, or robbing a bank exercise, a social activity. Over the years, single player games have offered co-op if the player has extra friends lying around, and that should certainly continue with Titanfall 2.
Most co-op games limit the amount of players from two to four, and that would be ideal here. Like Borderlands or Destiny, the enemies should get stronger or have greater numbers depending on the player count. Four Pilots working in tandem(or something like it) should force the opposing side to bring out the biggest and baddest Titans in the stock. Players should be able to customize the loadout of their characters, same as in multiplayer. Or, if the game opted to let you create a character with progress that carried across both modes, that’d be just as swell.
Lighten Up
This one sounds like a no-brainer, but it can’t be said enough: Titanfall 2’s campaign needs to be fun. The multiplayer is undoubtedly going to take up dozens or even hundreds of hours of everyone’s time, so nothing more about that needs to be said. But the story mode is a whole different beast.
Shooters these days aren’t best known for their gripping campaign modes. Perhaps the one that still holds up without some sort of qualifier attached to it would be Spec Ops: The Line or Wolfenstein, and that isn’t fun so much as it is depressingly entertaining. Lots of shooters have stories about war and taking back your country or planet from invaders, and this one is no exception.
That being said, Respawn should take this opportunity to just let the action do the heavy lifting with all that’s going on. Replicate those moments of “holy SHIT, did you see that?!” that we all have when we airdrop our Titan on someone (related: give us a theater mode). Give the player characters a chance to be excited at being able to pull off parkour and jump into the big, strong arms of a machine 12 times their size. That’s the stuff that’ll keep people coming back for solo fun. Not saying there needs to be laughs a minute or a clown needs to show up, but why does war have to be grim hell 24/7?
What would you like to see from Titanfall 2’s single player? Let us know in the comments below!
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