We told you earlier that Respawn Entertainment’s unannounced game had been leaked. If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for details of Titanfall, here they are.
Respawn Entertainment had hinted they would reveal their first title at E3. The title was instead leaked when Game Informer’s July Issue arrived at Google’s Play Store ahead of time and was spotted by NeoGAF user Cartman86. Here’s what’s known for now.
The Gameplay
The game is a multiplayer first-person-shooter set in a world of “mechs”; giant, mechanized machines controlled by players. In Titanfall, players act as “Pilots” to control 24-foot-tall “mechs” (kind of like the Power Rangers or Evangelion, maybe?) called “Titans“. These aren’t clunky robots, though; these guys can dodge, and swiftly, too.
The Pilots themselves are no ordinary humans. You can play either gender and they’re extremely agile, inhumanly fast, capable of running on walls and executing multiple jumps. They can also take out Titans themselves, by shooting them in the “brain”. Cunning “hit and fade” stealth tactics also come into play.
Ground-combat is also available. If you don’t want to actively control your Titan, you can toggle it to follow you around and autonomously attack enemies.
The Story
The game exudes a feel of District 9 or Blade Runner. Its story is typical dystopian fare: humans are divided between Earth and off-Earth frontiers. A corporation attempts to seize the resources of the frontier population. The storytelling style will be similar to Left 4 Dead’s scenes. There will be a progression system, but no details are yet available.
Game Modes
The game maps will contain AI enemies that can be hacked to join your cause. It also features several play modes: Campaign Multiplayer, “traditional” multiplayer mode, and a “One-Player Mode”.
As if seeking to separate it from the Call of Duty games, the devs added that players will survive longer in Titanfall than in CoD, thus reducing the repetitive die-and-respawn cycle for newer players.
The multiplayer mode will also include “memorable single player moments”, though no details were given.
Built on a heavily modified version of Valve’s Source Engine, the game can run to 60 FPS on a console. GameInformer asked if the 5 gigs of DDR3 RAM allotted to devs on the Xbox One would be problematic, but Respawn replied that it was more than enough at this stage of development. The game will have unlimited dedicated servers, offloading “a few dozen AI” with the Xbox One’s cloud server capability.
Respawn formed when much of the former dev team of the Call of Duty franchise quit and formed their own group. They had originally planned the game for the current-gen consoles, but decided against it, and when Microsoft offered them a deal, the game was set for XboxOne.
Titanfall is set to release in Spring 2014 on XboxOne and PC. An Xbox 360 version will be produced by another developer. Respawn has said that multiplatform versions are a possibility in the future.
