[notbov]

So, along with DS2, military-y shootman/wall-running simulator/Xbone savior Titanfall comes out this Tuesday. For those of you who don't know or don't care (in which case, why are you reading this), Titanfall is the first game from Respawn, formed from the smoldering ashes of the exodus of talent from Infinity Ward after MW2 and the subsequent unpleasantness with Activision (I will not comment on the irony that Zampella and co. ended back up with EA, but it is kinda funny). It's about two groups of people who don't like each other very much and reconcile their differences by shooting each other with guns and giant robots and occasionally chasing each other like squirrels using parkour.

This translates into a multiplayer-only game about 12 people running around and shooting each other in a style very reminiscent of Call of Battlefield games, except for the part where all the players have jetpacks so they can Prince of Persia around the maps and summon giant robots that they can pilot. The other notable difference is that the game is filled with AI troops who are powered by The Cloud (this means dedicated servers) who are so goddamn dumb that they serve almost solely as fodder for getting your Titan on the ground or powered up when they aren't trying their hardest to make maps look filled.

Your robot buddy, the Titan, acts as a sort of replacement to killstreaks by being a giant robot, but still isn't overpowering; rather, Titans are a lateral shift of power and you can really only get it sooner than everyone else instead of shutting everyone else out of their own. You can also tell it to do its own thing and the Titan AI is shockingly competent at times, unlike certain other AI entities.

So anyway, this comes out with a huge, staggering amount of maps (14!) (I feel the need to point out my sarcasm here) and all your favorite game modes represented, like team deathmatch, capture the flag, domination/hardpoint and a new twist on an old favorite, team deathmatch except killing the AI troops gives points too. It also has some campaign multiplayer thing in lieu of any kind of single player (who would ever want to play games by themselves?!) with a story and the reward of the two other pilotable Titans locked behind finishing them up. I'm interested in seeing how this works out, seeing as how well it worked in Brink (;_;) and the leak that the campaign keeps going even if your team loses.

So now that I've typed out a bunch of seemingly hateful bullshit, let me just say that I was lucky enough to get into the PC beta and I am hyped beyond all imaginable belief to play this game for hours on end. The Bone and PC versions go live Tuesday and the 360 version gets in late a couple of weeks later like that poor pilot who isn't killing anything and gets their Titan last. I'll be playing on the PC because I don't have an extra 500 bucks sitting around at the moment to indulge in the Xbone Desperation Pack with free Titanfall. Now that all the boring stuff is out of the way, we can talk about how the game really isn't doing anything different, but does it really well.
_________________

[notbov]

[notbov]

honestly, it handles like CoD, but you can't play it like CoD because it has verticality and giant robots roaming after 3 minutes

fun fact: the game is out in Korea and Origin is fooled by VPNs
_________________

[notbov]

these other not-featured-in-beta maps are pretty good

Campaign mode in this game is nigh worthless except for the part where you play through them to unlock Titan chasises. bunch of story you can't really care about in game because you're too busy playing it, mostly because it's all audio. but that Stryder Titan.... it's power up is infinite dashing and that makes me hot and bothered.
_________________

[notbov]

[notbov]

[notbov]

ah, I see now, Campaign isn't worthless, it's the perfect place to farm tons of XP off of new players when you regenerate and start all over. this is good for people like me who have no shame what so ever. I guess the setting and actual story are interesting, but the problem is that, 95% of the time, the story is happening off-screen or simply around you as opposed to you being a active participant (ignoring that each mission ends the same way regard of which team wins since you stay in the same lobby for all 9 maps and things just can't stop or that'd get in the way of the story and unlocks). more to the point, after the first prestige/regen thing, you have to finish specific challenges to hit the next one, which I won't hate until game makes me get a billion kills with a sniper or 50 kills while wallrunning or hack a turret while the moon is full or something stupid. thankfully, the ones I have now are ones I like (kill people with the shotgun? if you insist....).

the Stryder is the best thing ever and it's way too much fun drifting around corners and dancing around other Titans with the power of limited dash vectoring and then you hit the core ability and get unlimited dash and circle-dash-drifting starts. Respawn also lied when they said quickscoping wasn't in, I did that shit by accident and it made me a little sad.
_________________

[notbov]

my issue with the DMR is once you get enough unlocks, it loses its niche. the Carbine is better in that range in a lot of situations, the single shot rifle is better for CQC and the Krab or whatever the last sniper is way better for actual sniping. as for quickscoping, I'm not a CoD player so it was, to me, when you can ADS and instantly gain 100& accuracy and no spread what so ever, which I guess is equally as ridiculous. I haven't tried too much sniping on pad though, so I can't attest to how much aim assist kicks in.

not that any of it matters, I've seen a lot of PC players bitch and moan in game over the shotgun, which apparently is grossly overpowered or something.
_________________

[notbov]

[notbov]

not having an objective-based gametype usually bums me out (this is why Brink dying 5 minutes after launching was so depressing), but I've not ever touched CoD as an MP game so doing this is really burning me out

i'm still fiddling with my settings and optimizing things, but I'm getting 60 fps @ 1080p 90% of the time on all maps with textures set to med and lighting, effects and shadows turned to low. i5 2500k @ 4.4, GTX 470 with a tiny, tiny overclock. thinking about grabbing a 770 when I get some extra money to throw around but I'm still doing a bit better than the One version, so can't complain too much.
_________________

[notbov]

for all the qualms I've had and have about Origin, they have a no-nonsense refund policy. at this point, it's an inconveinence to need a separate program just for games from another publisher (as is Blizzard turning battle.net into such a thing and Uisoft with Uplay).
_________________

[notbov]

the whole prestige thing is just an indicator to other people that you've done the bullshit too much

speaking of which, I can't go to G6 because the game requires that I skeet 50 pilots who have rocketed out of their Titans and it would be easy except half the maps have too many indoor sections and the ones that are open have the fucking sun blaring light into my eyes. as a point of reference, I've gotten 8 times as many skeets doing this fucking challenge as I had in the playtime before starting it

and I thought the satchel charge and railgun challenges were dumb. I just want my smart pistol challenge already, I want to see people seethe with rage
_________________

[notbov]

as it is now, the game is totally, 100% pub matches because there's no private match option. could it be competitive? man, if people play comp L4D and 64-player BF, I'm confident people will at least do some GameBattles shit or what have you with this, at least in CTF and domination.

Pilot Hunter is kind of a good example; I've had a round where the score didn't change much for a goof 5-6 minutes while both teams were in a giant, crossmap Titan shootout. it was actually fairly tense, since Titan combat is a lot more weighty than on-foot along with having a higher time-to-kill and less reliance on first looks
_________________

[notbov]

I'm telling you, they bottled something good here. CoD-style run'n'gun becomes a lot more interesting when the "run" part is actually crazy ass aerobatics

for anyone who cares, the regen train hits the brakes at gen 8. sure, you get 2.5 times the XP (I played a bit tonight and did 1-27 in an hour), but you have to do the challenge where you win 100 rounds. to put this in perspective, most rounds are in the 7-12 minute range.

it serves me right to care about a dumb grind, but I'm already in too deep
_________________

[notbov]

it launched on PC and Xbone (the 360 version isn't out yet; it was supposed to come out this week, but got delayed another 2 weeks so they could tighten up the graphics on level 3) and, no, the player bases are separate, though you are free to play the PC version with a 360 pad/360 pad stand-in (it plays pretty decently on a DS4). though, even with turn speed turned up, you still can't whip around fast enough to to do sillier things when parkouring (aiming seems pretty solid, though).
_________________

[notbov]

yay, I hit gen 10, time to uninstall

the new, fancy improved matchmaking went live today; it does not do a very good job out in the wild. I never saw teams mixed up when lobbies stayed the same for 3+ rounds, it was constantly stacking multi-prestiged players on the same team (even for midgame joins) and god forbid if a lobby empties out, since it takes longer to find a match now. since the stacked players stay on and matchmaking struggles to find a match, you end up with a team with tons of play time being thrown against relative newcomers.

also, let me just go ahead and say that the 40mm cannon is stupidly overpowered if you can aim and every other titan weapon is nigh useless in comparison.
_________________

[notbov]

while I totally get that prestige isn't an indicator of skill (fuck, if I got to G10....), I've been in lobbies where my team, with no one below G4, will be thrown against a team where no one is above level 40. even with skill (or lack thereof) taken into account, there's a huge disparity in experience and map knowledge and they did end in 300-50 stomps. I'm still surprised that the whole "mix up teams every few games" thing doesn't happen (from what I've seen), since that would probably do more to keep things from being violently uneven than any sort of supposed skill-based matchmaking.

the Triple Threat is kinda bad, but the proxy mine version of it is fun as shit on hardpoint.
_________________

[notbov]

40mm cannon got nerfed, yet is still good if you can aim

totally fucking pissed at the Gooser challenge nerf, y'all got it easy (seriously, I can see toning it down, but all the way to 5 from 50? that's some bullshit)

and apparently the 360 version is the work of wizards and is surprisingly good
_________________

[notbov]

technically, custom lobbies are in beta

this is evident by the line in the patch notes that claims that anyone in the lobby can start or stop the countdown or change the game settings, as if everyone was the leader

frothing for that 120hz support so I can turn the settings down and make it look like a PS2 game again for all the framerates
_________________