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.