Titanfall has landed; here’s our Titanfall review.
Not 64, not 32, but 12 – six on each side. In the early hours of this morning, Respawn head Vince Zampella let slip that Titanfall’s total player count is closer to that of Counter-Strike than Battlefield.
“Turned out to be the best balance with AI for us,” Zampella explained to fans on Twitter, who promptly combusted into spinning fireworks of rage.
“It is what we find most fun,” he went on. “There are other games with higher player player counts if that’s your metric.”
It would be easy to pick on would-be players who’ve already decided that a low player count will leave Titanfall quantifiably worse off than its competitors. But it’s easy to see where they might have got the wrong impression.
Titanfall’s trailers and b-rolls to date have seemed heavily populated – the drop ship players occupy just one of tens blotting up the map’s sky. Level openings in particular have been filled with noise and scripted sequences that reference wider conflict – and at certain points, AI allies and antagonists have swarmed over the scenery.
Perhaps we need to be patient. Respawn have talked on more than one occasion about their efforts to fold narrative into a multiplayer context – but the truth is that Titanfall isn’t something we understand quite yet. Zampella told followers that Respawn “did a lot of testing” before coming to their decision on player numbers, and pointed out: “that’s humans only count”.
“There are lots of AI,” said the studio founder. “Enough to make it fun. The players are the real threat though.”
He added: “Everyone can have a Titan in follow or guard mode too.”
Our Jules certainly didn’t seem short of targets in his Titanfall hands on. But maybe a slim player count is a dealbreaker for some of you lot?
Thanks, VG247.