Why We Fight: What Titanfall's Not-Single-Player Does For The Campaign As We Know It

These days, for me to touch a competitive multiplayer game is a rarity. Long gone are the days when I'd hop onto Xbox Live and cook fools in Halo: Reach or whatever Call of Duty game was in vogue. They say practice makes perfect but practice in an FPS game is a soul-crushing endeavor: enduring the torment of junior high students berating you for not having played the game as much as they have. Because of this, you "suck" like a "noob" and they've done all sorts of disgusting things to you and with your mother. Enduring the harassment becomes tiresome and to stoop to their level would not only be beneath you but possibly borderline illegal.

While you'd like to pump a few digital rounds into your foul-mouthed opponents, you can't because the little asshole came flying in through a corridor you forgot about or had no idea existed because unlike that kid whose been on since 8 AM because he was "sick," you just logged on after getting home from work. Because you have a job.

Anymore, FPSes are expected to provide players with single player and multiplayer options. The former, while might be saddled with an interesting story and compelling characters, is always overshadowed by the multiplayer element. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had a reasonably strong narrative for a military shooter, and while some of its campaign moments are fondly remembered, the game's multiplayer was the real honeypot and for good reason.

But the shooter genre has always been characterized by a schizophrenic divide between play styles: you could either play by yourself and let the story wash over you or you could dig into the trenches and combat fellow players on the virtual battlefield with no prominent narrative outside of what you might tell your buddies the next day. Games with a cooperative element would likely have story, but they nearly always were the single player with a second controller plugged in. Not a true multiplayer narrative. 

Developer Splash Damage is perhaps best known for their two Enemy Territory games based in the Wolfenstein and Quake universes, but in 2011 they put out a multiplayer-only game called Brink. Technically, it contained a single player option but the gameplay was strictly based on the multiplayer element. If players chose single player, they were just playing multiplayer with AI. But the game attempted to have a narrative that came through the competitive gameplay. Players were split into factions at war in a dystopian future city and a vague story was told through the matches. While the game didn't do all that well at launch, I'd like to believe that Titanfall drew some inspiration from Brink. 

My own experience with Brink is limited, but I think its lack of success might serve to underscore the inherent difficulty in dropping story into multiplayer. You can attempt to compose a complex narrative like Bioshock Infinite for a multiplayer game, but in the end it's going to take away from the pacing of a team-based deathmatch. The reverse is equally disappointing: lackluster story will only sap the life out of a single player campaign. 

Titanfall does seem to borrow some of Brink's superficial elements: multiplayer-based narrative with parkour-style movement. It does so with some better success, however. For one, it makes no attempt to deceive its players: Titanfall is all multiplayer, baby. There is a campaign, but it's not single player. Instead, it's your standard multiplayer match with a story-infused mission briefing in the game lobby before the match begins. Each map is a different mission with a unique intro. You're not just jumping out of a dropship. You're discovering an abandoned colony. Or watching as a drunken pilot is being shoved into a sewer hole for safe keeping. Then, throughout the match, NPCs chime in with updates about not only how the match is going but how it affects the world outside the map. Depending on how well your team is doing, their scripted chatter's going to change. 

Now, Titanfall's narrative isn't going to challenge your notions about the human condition and what it is to be a thinking individual with agency. Most reviewers weren't big on it, like Tina Amini who showed little love for the paper-thin storyline in her Kotaku review. But Respawn's effort is a step in a good direction if not a significantly large step. And maybe not the strict "right" direction, but its potential does make me feel warm and fuzzy. Respawn makes starting the match a little more interesting by giving each match context. You're not just shooting other soldiers. You're capturing a giant railgun to sic on some spaceships. If your team loses the match, guess who's getting introduced to Mr. Giant Space Cannon. These aren't just random acts of coordinated violence: they're part of a larger picture. You're part of a larger picture. 

But if you couldn't give less of a shit about context or a big picture, you can go into "classic" mode where you can just get down and dirty. Ditch the pretense of story for what you really bought the game for: to humiliate strangers and tell them what you did to their moms.

Titanfall: Did it Fall Too Late?

Titanfall comes out this week and if you haven't heard, it's a real treat. What I mean to say is, I hope it changes the scope of the first person shooter today substantially. In an industry inundated with military shooters such as the bombastic and cinematic Call of Duty series or simulation-heavy ARMA games, we're trapped in this limbo between the worlds of realism and entertainment. The guns in Call of Duty all have real life counterparts, and if you speak to a teenager who puts in most of his time on the game's online multiplayer, he might start talking like a damn gunsmith. 

Thankfully, Titanfall dodges that bullet with a backflip. Based on what I played of the beta, it's damn enjoyable. It's fast-paced and Respawn Entertainment changes the formula of the military shooter significantly by adding a z-axis. Each player is deployed with a jetpack. Not a new development, you may say. True. And while it doesn't allow for Tribes-scale jump distances, it does give the player enough mobility to run along walls and climb up the tops of buildings and giant robots--

It took me too long to talk about the giant robots. The titular titans are the giant robots to which I refer. Giant robots that you can jump onto and jump into, shooting up grunts and bipedal drones and other giant robots. This is a game that I've wanted ever since I first saw Gundam Wing when I was a kid but never quite got. Sure, there was the Dreamcast game Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise from the Ashes, which I rented along with a Dreamcast numerous times from my local video store. But I could never drop out of my mobile suit and tread the ground on foot. Though why would you want to when you've got five-story robots stomping around and being generally loud?

It's a formula I'd like to believe the games industry has been meditating on for a while but not quite sure how to get it right. The obvious problem is that giant robots could easily overcome foot soldiers because, oh I dunno, they're giant robots. But Titanfall might've gotten it right. The robots aren't too giant--they're bigger than a person but they're only as tall as a two-story building. And while their weaponry is designed to give squishy humans and steel-plated robots equally bad days, they're susceptible to a sneaky enemy pilot jumping on the back and shooting inner components because that feels right. 

So where has this game been? Why are we just now getting it? Did we have to suffer through a plague of generic military shooters before we got the one that might deliver us from boredom? Now I admit, Call of Duty is an easy target. You don't put a game out every year in the same franchise and proclaim to reinvent the shooty wheel. And it would be remiss to ignore the Call of Duty DNA built into Titanfall: unlockable attachments, competitive team-based multiplayer, nearly identical controls. It should all make sense--they're both birthed from the same parents. 

But this kid's got something different. Something promising. It's like the gene pool is evolving. Why keep our players glued to the ground? Why force them to use the stairs when it comes to getting to the top floor? I want to believe this is the start of something beautiful. I don't have to have another game with giant robots (though I'll certainly take one). But the freedom of movement available to players in Titanfall should be a sign of something. 

We've been moving towards this. Slowly, but surely. Mirror's Edge introduced parkour sensibilities to the first-person perspective. Unfortunately, parkour alone does not a game make. And even then, the controls still felt clunky. You can't have clunk when you're trying to move like David Belle. Respawn recognized that and built on that with controls that were at one time just meant to just run and shoot. But now they mantle over rooftops and run across walls like you took the red pill. 

If only everybody in the industry could take that same pill.