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.