Titanfall Beta thoughts.

[Riff Moonraker]

I have been playing all weekend, and I have to say that I am very impressed with the gameplay. It is fast, fun, frantic, and leaves you panting and wanting more. It is ripe for strategy, stealth, head-on combat, or however else you might want to play. It isnt without its concerns, though, and I am hoping that when the full game comes out that they will be addressed and I will have nothing to fret about. But with the lack of a single player campaign, I truly hope they find someway to at least merge some kind of story into the game, because I would think they would want you to become more invested in this world, and its characters. Without anything at all, I am concerned you will lose something. Also, if they dont have any kind of campaign to speak of, then this game should have the most impressive customization that you have ever seen in a game, EVER. Granted, its only the beta, so you should only be getting a taste... and thats what I am hoping for. If the customization isnt TREMENDOUSLY bigger than what we got in the beta, then I might very well be disappointed, and I truly hope that doesnt happen.

 

[Jangles]

I signed up for the Beta even though I thought the game would be CoD rip off crap.

I am glad to admit that I really enjoyed the beta, even on my crap computer playing at min settings and still lagging. I just hope the customization options keep up with the frantic pace of play.

Also, I feel that they are doing a good job of balancing playing on foot and as a titan. It's not at all like the frustration of encountering an armoured vehicle in BF3/BF4 and not being an engineer, then switching to engineer and suddenly there are no more armoured vehicles around.

 

[DugMachine]

I'm enjoying it so far but I do have my problems with the game.

-Smart pistols are the most stupid fucking thing ever. A gun that auto aims as long as you keep it pointed in somewhat the same direction? Just stupid.

-Stealth lasts a bit too long in my opinion and as others have said, the camping in corners in stealth with a smart pistol really just puts me in a bad mood.

-AI are dumb as rocks. No two ways about it. Just there to get some easy points but having to kill AI to gain attachments for your guns is not a good idea in my opinion.

Aside from all that, it plays like a call of duty game and the mech combat is pretty fun. Definitely not buying it at release though. Will wait for a sale of some sort before I get it. Fun but not $60 fun.

 

[Yuuki]

As a PC player here are my initial impressions about Titanfall demo (it's not a beta, really):

The good stuff:
1) Movement system is very good, a bit like Crysis 3 except there is even more vertical scaling with wallrunning and double-jumping.
2) FoV can be adjusted up to 90. Thank fucking god, it's literally the only thing keeping me from saying this was a 100% console port.
3) Titan vs Titan combat can get pretty strategic.

The bad stuff:
1) No Oceanic servers for Aus/NZ players. Getting grouped with <50ms US players while being at 150-200ms = strange hit registration and deaths (expected). Aus/NZ customers who are buying this game assuming it will be like other PC online shooters (local servers/etc) are going to cause an uproar.
2) No server browser. You are always playing with randoms with random pings.
3) No custom or private servers
4) No text chat, which further cements the idea that you are basically a nobody who will never be able to communicate with anybody. No I shouldn't have to use voice chat.
5) Locked to 60 fps. Inexcusable because I know that Source engine can run at virtually any framerate. My 120hz monitor was bought for the express purpose of playing fast-paced games like this one.
6) AI are too distracting and serve little purpose. Since all AI are shaped like humanoids and this is a twitch-based shooter, most of the time I kill an "enemy" only to realize I'm killing AI.
7) SMART pistol is fucking stupid. Why, just why? Recoil-less guns further reinforce that this was really aimed at consoles.
8) Gameplay feels strangely repetitive and unrewarding after a while. I'll leave it down to being a limited demo. Will wait for other people's impressions on the full release.

Overall I get the impression that Titanfall is very much a console game that PC players were "lucky" enough to get a semi-decent port made out of. No surprises considering Respawn is aiming for the CoD demographic (90% console players).

Too many reasons for me not to buy this game. I'll only remotely consider it if problems #1 and #5 are addressed first (at the least), as it is what I require for a functional experience.

 

[Sarah Kerrigan]

From what i've played of it, I like it. I love a game with little details, and my favorite is when you launch a titan, you literally see your own screen shake and your character shake. And when the titan falls, it's pretty badass and you feel powerful being in a titan. The shooting is intense and the graphics look pretty good.

I might buy it, might not. It literally comes out after my birthday, so I might pick it up with birthday money.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

It is FAST! In some ways it reminds me of Quake III: Arena in that it's just relentless, but for some reason I haven't got the "been there, done that" feeling from it. You wouldn't know it is 6 v 6 because there's always something going on. Someone mentioned that they saw a lot of campers, but I have to say I've seen the opposite. Most campers get ganked pretty quickly if they stay in the same position for too long.

I get the feeling Respawn are tweaking it on the fly because I've played it over the course of five days and you start to notice subtle changes. For one the Grunts have gone from being absolutely useless to next to useless. I saw one kick a human player to death last night. First time ever. Also, it seems to play a lot smoother as time has gone by, and this is amazing considering my one bar of connection wi-fi.

The bad stuff:
1) No Oceanic servers for Aus/NZ players. Getting grouped with <50ms US players while being at 150-200ms = strange hit registration and deaths (expected). Aus/NZ customers who are buying this game assuming it will be like other PC online shooters (local servers/etc) are going to cause an uproar.

I wonder if that's a PC thing because on the Xbox One I was playing against all Aussies and the server popped up as "Asia" in the bottom right corner for a brief moment. Wish you could browse for servers thought.

 

[austerus]

Yes I've played the Beta, Yes the smart pistol is a piece of crap weapon that does not need to exist in any shape or form. Yes, It absolutely wrecks packs of grunts. 4 Grunts, got a smart pistol? No problem. They are all dead in the blink of eye. Add the mod that speeds up targeting (and bc the game *doesn't* tell pilots they've been targeted by it) and it's a close range monster. Yes it will lost cqb battles to a smg user, but that is only because of the smg's obnoxious rate of fire...

Yeah, that's what balance means. Another weapon has a quality that can cancel out the other when properly used. Every weapon needs to have ups and downs to get a balance which is practically done here.

The pistol isn't a close range monster at any time. If you get killed by it, you deserve it because you spent time moving so slow as to allow the user a chance to target you enough for a kill shot or you spend too much time in a place without looking around. That's not the gun's fault, it's your own. I don't see why the game should compensate for your carelessness.

Either the SMG or the shotgun are better weapons when you play the game at the dynamic rate (you know, running, jumping, hanging all the time, etc) the game was intended to be played at. The pistol is there to give a chance to static players but it's mostly effective against grunts and other static players. Which is fine by me.

Yes, I do think it needs more of a recoil, but the auto targeting that takes up a few seconds (about 3 with enhancement) isn't OP at all. If you spend that much time lingering in the open, you deserve it.

 

[electric method]

Yes I've played the Beta, Yes the smart pistol is a piece of crap weapon that does not need to exist in any shape or form. Yes, It absolutely wrecks packs of grunts. 4 Grunts, got a smart pistol? No problem. They are all dead in the blink of eye. Add the mod that speeds up targeting (and bc the game *doesn't* tell pilots they've been targeted by it) and it's a close range monster. Yes it will lost cqb battles to a smg user, but that is only because of the smg's obnoxious rate of fire...

Yeah, that's what balance means. Another weapon has a quality that can cancel out the other when properly used. Every weapon needs to have ups and downs to get a balance which is practically done here.

The pistol isn't a close range monster at any time. If you get killed by it, you deserve it because you spent time moving so slow as to allow the user a chance to target you enough for a kill shot or you spend too much time in a place without looking around. That's not the gun's fault, it's your own. I don't see why the game should compensate for your carelessness.

Either the SMG or the shotgun are better weapons when you play the game at the dynamic rate (you know, running, jumping, hanging all the time, etc) the game was intended to be played at. The pistol is there to give a chance to static players but it's mostly effective against grunts and other static players. Which is fine by me.

Yes, I do think it needs more of a recoil, but the auto targeting that takes up a few seconds (about 3 with enhancement) isn't OP at all. If you spend that much time lingering in the open, you deserve it.

Ugh, It is OP and not balanced. No, I didn't linger out in the open and get killed a lot by smart pistol as implied. Actually I found Titanfall to be insanely easy as a game. I ended the beta with an almost 6.0 k/d overall and 3.1 k/d against pilots; namely because I *didn't* play statically.

Here is the thing about the Smart Pistol and other weapons... they can be abused to all hell by the players with ease. Here's a fun fact... there is a burn card that allows a pilot to use both Cloak and Stim at the same time. The stim part is unlimited. Pair that with a smart pistol or EVA-8 shotgun and you have someone that is going to destroy literally everyone else on the field. What the hell is balanced about a person that has an unlimited faster base movement speed and cloak paired with a smart pistol? Or how about the burn card that makes so there is NO build time on a titan? Yeah that's right start a match with a Titan right off spawn. That is not balanced. Balance isn't just making a weapon have some downsides and then claiming it's balanced. No, it's actually balancing the weapon against others in the sandbox. Respawn, even when they were Infinity Ward, have never made a game where the weapons, perks, and sandbox were balanced. Titanfall just takes those years of unbalanced multiplayer and multiplies it by a factor of 10 or so.

As I said in another thread, people need to understand this fact; A game can be both fun and mediocre. Titanfall is both fun *and* mediocre at the same time. Hell, Respawn built a franchise around that fact before (CoD anyone?) and has now done so again. I can tell you that on Respawn's forums there have already been a large number of threads decrying the Smart Pistol and how Op it is. You can be damned sure there will be thousands more after launch as well because the weapon is literally meant for a single player experience not a multiplayer one. More threads will pop up about burn cards and how broken they are as well as the dumb as bricks bots that are nothing but cannon fodder. Balanced? Yeah, no.