Titanfall is still EA's most innovative shooter ten years later | Hacker News Reader

Titanfall is still EA's most innovative shooter ten years later

kotaku.com

28 pointsnamanyayg22 comments

One of the most overhyped game I've ever played. Incredibly boring and uninspired. It’s the 100th run and gun CoD clone of the 2010s there is nothing special about it apart from meching up… but that’s all? I mean there are better mech fighters out there (Armored Core for example)

It's not the mechs that make it special, it's the movement system. Shooters generally regressed from doing wall jumps and dodges in UT2003 to slow, plodding, realistic ground movement. Cover based shooters were probably the nadir for me personally. Titanfall 1 & 2 are the rare recent examples of mainstream shooters where complex movement is possible[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwz0FHdRQa8

The movement was much more dynamic than the CoDs from the time, the 3-dimensional fights reminded me much more of the time I played Unreal Tournament and Quake than any CoD and much less CS that I used to play competitively from the betas to 1.6.

So yeah, completely disagree with your take.

It is not just the mechs that make it special

It is the combination of having to play as pilot, when you are small and nimble but fragile, AND as mech, when you are big and clumsy but durable and powerful.

Dropping an additional reason why you are incredibly incorrect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39755278. Single player levels were very inspired (I never played MP).

Titanfall 2 is also fantastic and still has a fairly active community!

Did they fix the servers yet? For a long while there it was nearly impossible to finish a multiplayer match, the servers were getting slammed with some kind of attack and rendered it basically unplayable. I would love to get back to some Frontier Defense...

The community took matters into their own hands: https://northstar.tf

The campaign has that one level everyone who's played it knows. One of the most creative levels in a modern game.

The multiplayer was so good the first 2-3 years after the game released. Then they started nerfing it a bunch and then some issue began with people DDOS'ing their servers.

Indeed, fantastic level! I was surprised I enjoyed the campaign as much as I did. FPS campaigns are usually a bit arse.

I still replay the campaign every so often, it's still very good, is not too long and very enjoyable, I'd love a PS5 update but I doubt that's coming.

Don't bother reading. Neither is there backing for this claim, nor is the article more interesting than its headline.

As a veteran of first-person shooters I found Apex Legends to be very difficult. Maybe I'm old, or maybe "movement shooters" are simply not my skillet. I excel at almost every other shooter, but despite 100+ hours on Apex I'm still terrible. I think it's the "movement" part (or maybe the cheating), as I still dominate in games like CS:GO and Fortnite.

Imo Apex Legend is one of those game like Team Fortress 2, where it's only at a higher number of hours that you can truly develop your game senses and not die stupidly.

It's those game where there is so much to learn and with a high skill ceiling, so it takes time to get good at it.

Is anyone old enough to have played both Titanfall and Starsiege: Tribes?

If so, curious on your take on game design comparisons.

Building an FPS with wildly disparate power mechanics always seemed like an interesting challenge.

(Never played Titanfall, but I assume it's power vs agility balance?)

I used to play Tribes 1/2 but being honest don't remember as much the movement mechanics compared to my memory of Titanfall 1/2. Remember the skiing, picking up speed, launching into the air with the jetpack and zig-zagging but not much more...

Titanfall definitely had as a core mechanic the power/durability of being in mech vs the agility with the ability to "ride" on an enemy's mech to destroy it.

It was very well done, I had lots of fun cornering enemies and riding on them to destroy the mech. The feeling as a mech of seeing a pilot quickly moving towards you and the panic of trying to get them before they get to you was a very satisfying thrill.

Titanfall 2's single player campaign is one of the greatest experiences I've had.

Other companies are no stranger to this phenomenon either. Warcraft Classic is Blizzard's, and arguably the MMO genre's most innovative game right now, and its 20 years old.

Why is Classic more innovative than Retail?

Really? EA pulled the first version off from Steam.

EA. 99.9% of the times the publisher is the one who remove a game, Valve has nothing to do with it.

Right, corrected.

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