Titanfall has landed; here’s our Titanfall review.
When jumping ship from Infinity Ward to create Respawn, Vince Zampella and Jason West had all the freedom they could possibly have to expand into new, unexplored territory. With their new EA contract they could have made an MMO, a hack-and-slash, or even an hyper-realistic simulation of the life of a sheepdog. Instead they made Titanfall, a multiplayer FPS. Old habits die hard? “It was just kind of a natural choice” says Zampella.
Talking to GameInformer, Zampella explains that the big push towards free-to-play was something they looked at but swifty moved away from. “It’s something you look at – obviously a lot of games are going that way. I think there is some truth to it being the future, but I don’t think it’s the only future. There has always been the blockbuster, and I think there always will be. Maybe people will buy less of them, but I don’t always want to play a game where it’s free to play and a dollar for this and a dollar for that. I have some, I play some, but it’s not what everybody wants.”
As Respwan expanded, more and more ideas got thrown around for the studio’s big debut. “Our team grew pretty fast, so we had a lot of people with a lot of ideas, and they all wanted their idea to be number one. So we had to figure out how do you focus that down and keep everybody happy. It was a pretty tough process.”
“The choice to do another FPS…we’re doing something new, we wanted the idea to be different and new in terms of gameplay and mechanics,” Zampella said. “Breaking farther beyond that and doing a racing game or something we’re not familiar with wasn’t the smart thing to do. For us it’s something that’s in our wheelhouse that we can innovate on and do something new and expand from there. It was just kind of a natural choice.”
Whilst there’s undoubtedly many out there who sighed at hearing ex-CoD guys were working on a loud and stompy multiplayer game, the team’s E3 presentation demonstrated a game that, whilst certainly wearing its Call of Duty DNA proudly, pushes forward the genre in an interesting direction. A cinematic multiplayer game? Wall-running pilots fighting against mechs that don’t feel like sitting ducks? Despite being an FPS, you can’t say that Respawn haven’t tried to bring something new to the table.