Titanfall 2’s Story Mode Breakdown
The consistent positive talk I’ve been hearing about Titanfall 2 as a multiplayer game and surrounding its single-player mode ended in me breaking down and buying the game at $40 on a recent sale. I plowed through the story mode first figuring it’d give me a good understanding of some of the game’s core mechanics and I always fancied story modes to Call of Duty games so I figured this would be a fitting and familiar experience. As the story progressed I found myself really thinking back on the story mode in Call of Duty games and then critically breaking down the various pieces of Titanfall 2’s story mode. So here’s my long trail of thoughts pieced together in the best “review” I can give it. There’s a lot to talk about and discuss here I think and it’s fascinating that we’re not considering the potential in this story mode so much as the world is instead talking about how the game is underselling. Maybe some really great discussion will get some people interested. I certainly would hate to see the passionate people at Respawn have to find new jobs and see the massive IP that they and EA have launched shut down like so many EA development teams before them.
WARNING: SPOILERS for the story mode of Titanfall 2. I’d still suggest you consider buying the game and if you don’t care about Titanfall at all but do miss good story modes to games like Call of Duty or Battlefield, I’d really suggest you keep reading. Call of Duty and Battlefield games have a long history with me to the point that I’m going to be getting a bit more…expository in this review. Just letting you know: You’ve been extra warned.
I should go on record and let it be known that I haven’t finished a Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare 1. I’ve played maybe an hour of Black Ops III because it came with my PS4 and I was bored and boy was that…not fun. The same applied to the Battlefield games after Battlefield 2142. I had a brief stint with Battlefield 3 but it was quickly uprooted when one of my friends suggested we try Insurgency. Really though, the big, poppy “blockbuster” shooter that has a story mode of intense, easy-but-visceral gameplay that serves as a gateway into an even bigger and more visceral multiplayer mode is something that got lost on me somewhere after Modern Warfare. I actually never got into Call of Duty’s multiplayer till one random summer in 2009 or 2010 or something. I don’t know why but single-player was always the way to go for me and after 2007 I stopped asking for Call of Duty every holiday season.
Much of my distance from those games was just a result of my own treading across the game landscape. In the wake of 2007’s Modern Warfare (certainly one of the best shooters ever, not gonna deny it) I found myself trying out other games. Bioshock made me realize even shooters could be creative and give us worlds with lots of depth. A year later Dead Space made me realize I can enjoy scary things and survival horror action style games. Audiosurf happened somewhere in there and as Fallout 3 was about to make everyone fall in love with the franchise, I explored bigger world RPGs by going to the first of the series while simultaneously playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. A couple years later and after revisiting old Star Wars games aplenty because this was when Star Wars games were first arriving on Steam I was introduced to cooperative fun like in Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, and then Amnesia: The Dark Descent happened. That last game’s impact on me I think was stronger than I knew at the time. The vulnerable story-heavy atmospheric survival horror kicked something in my brain and it wasn’t long before I was eating up games like The Walking Dead, Firewatch, Life is Strange, and Gone Home as the critical darlings of my current generation. Basically I was learning that there’s so much more to video games than shooting. And yet things like Spec Ops: The Line and Far Cry 3 just made me think that we could still be doing MORE with shooters that we usually weren’t. That turned into a video game snob across the past 9 years, I’ll admit. I wanted to be bothered by the fact that Activision and whatever developer they paid to push out Call of Duty that year was creatively bankrupting the industry by not pushing everyone into doing something greater than just more of the same. It wasn’t until I did some good soul searching over the past year and reading Don’t Die’s interviews (srsly go read some) that I had to admit to myself that it’s okay for big selling games to come out that have easier appeal to many. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that Activision doesn’t make Call of Duty my kind of game anymore (or maybe the fact that I outgrew Call of Duty’s plotlines).
Enter Titanfall, a game generated by the hard working people at Respawn Entertainment, a company forged out of the brutal and unfortunate situation where many Infinity Ward employees left the company across the Modern Warfare series after the company’s founders either left or were fired, weren’t paid by Activision for royalties, and started a lawsuit against the company. Infinity Ward lost about 50% of its staff as things progressed and out of the ashes came Respawn Entertainment, who worked with EA to secure their science fiction parkour-based shooter experience: Titanfall. I didn’t play it. Maybe I had forgotten how cool Pacific Rim was just a year ago and that exo-suits were cool, but I really think it was because my friends weren’t playing it and it didn’t have a story mode for me to dive in alone. I heard lots of people complaining actually that it didn’t have a story mode, that this game’s universe isn’t fleshed out (people around me were comparing it heavily to Bungie’s Destiny on this flaw). And now the sequel does have a story mode. With enough hype talk, a brief look at the game and a quick understanding of what the story’s trying to explore (the relationship between a soldier/pilot and his exo-suit’s AI: Named BT), I bought in.
The first thing I should talk about is the game’s universe and leading story. This is actually where most of my complaints come in and then the praise comes after. You’re Jack Cooper, a foot soldier working for a Militia that’s fighting something called the IMC. I have no clue who the Militia are, how big they are, and I don’t know who the IMC are, or how big they are or what their plans are. Apparently the Militia is small enough to consider their main planet of operations vital to their war effort (Harmony). The game has a cinematic opening with Jack giving a voiceover about how awesome the Titan and Pilots are and how a foot soldier like him is a long way off from ever becoming a great Pilot like we see in the footage. Queue Jack being pushed into the role of piloting BT, an original model Titan whose pilot we see get killed in battle on the planet Typhon to stop the IMC from doing…something. We assume it to be evil and sinister because…actually we’re never told or shown that the IMC is evil or sinister and the Militia seems to have enough forces to wear similar suits and clothing unless you’re a Pilot. So I guess these are very similar forces fighting for two different things. I don’t even know what IMC stands for to be honest.
This is where the plot is at its weakest. This game constantly has dialog about the IMC, the Militia, the current state between them, how the main plot could spell bad news for the Militia, who the Militia’s leader is, who the leader of the IMC is, and we’re told who is bad and good but never really why. Motivations are just empty here for a good hour or so until we come across an interesting level of the game where the player and BT are separated. Jack is making his way through some sort of an open assembly room where claw arms pick up giant slabs of concrete and are placing grass and trees on them and putting homes on them. The mass production of the trees and homesteads made me actually wonder if the Militia was formed out of a large group of farmers or construction workers or something of a workforce standing up against a large corporation that put them all out of work with some mass produced product. The trees hanging upside down from production racks were kind of a giveaway on this idea for me. As the level progresses we see the long slabs of buildings and grass and trees assembled into one, and the boss character we’re working our way up to challenges us to climb up several of these slabs hanging SIDEWAYS over a large chasm. We do, and things get even more interesting up top as some sort of a dome is overhead and the border of this top location shows an interesting edge.
Moments like this made me say “What is going on?” And the curiosity of what this plot entailed was really getting me interested. So unfortunate that moments later several Militia soldiers were released onto these large constructed fields in advance and I heard some overhead chatter about starting a simulation and then a bunch of robots and a new enemy type small-mech were released onto the field to kill the Militia soldiers. “Oh,” my brain went. “It’s just a bunch of live simulations to improve some robots…all right. No new depth found about the Militia or the IMC.” In fact, this wasn’t even IMC based, this facility was being run by a mercenary of another group hired by the IMC to do some dirty work for the IMC, making sure our Militia never succeeds. You fight them across the plotline and they’re kind of interesting. They’re decently voice acted and each enemy has a unique weapon set that I bet is a part of the multiplayer component (I later found out it was). Well thought out stuff, I certainly found my favorite Titan weapon set by the end of the game. It featured a deployable shield, a scanning shell that I could launch far away to track enemy movement, a salvo of rockets that tracks enemies if I hit them three times, and a very big salvo of rockets that does what you’d expect.
Never again in the game do I really wonder or consider more about the Militia or the IMC, the game never has a moment that makes me think there could be more and the story doesn’t deliver more. It feels like either player attention span is expected to be that low and that focused on the gameplay or this is a world development that was fleshed out in the first game. But all I heard about Titanfall 1 was the cool gameplay and that it didn’t have a story to tell. Look, science fiction or fantasy worlds are built, they’re not something that just exist for people. Even the legendary Half-Life 1 and 2 get expository at times with terms and reinforced imagery to help players understand the setting of the world. Even Modern Warfare 1, a game grounded in a reality that didn’t need much explaining, went to smart lengths to help the player understand who is who, what they’re up to, and what the player is up to. News feeds in loading screens help us understand that a coup is happening in a Middle Eastern country and the coup is led by Khaled Al-Azad, who might have nukes. We play as the US military being sent in to stop Al-Azad. And we play as the SAS finding out about the nukes. And then when the nuke goes off and our US military character dies in the explosion, we find out from the SAS perspective that Imran Zakaev is actually the villain of the plot and we get two entire levels to help us understand who this guy is and what his involvement in the plot means.
And that game was a brown shooter whose world building used modern day events as inspiration, something that everyone can see and more or less kind of get where we are and what’s going on. In Titanfall 2, we’re just expected to know who Sauron is without that opening 20 minutes of The Lord of the Rings. This game isn’t entirely brainless and soulless and I think there’s a good credo we should add to the semi-annual (or annual) blockbuster story mode shooter (even if it’s sci-fi):
If you’re going to invest time in a story mode, invest it. Do not waste your development cycle on something that isn’t worth explaining and sell a world only half built.
So with our overarching motivations left to just two names and an assumption, we turn our focus to the characters of the plot. Our two protagonists Jack and BT were clearly where most of the effort went. The game is obviously less about this made up Militia/IMC struggle and actually about the relationship between Jack and BT. And it’s….kind of successful. The gameplay lets players pick dialog responses from Jack to BT about the current mission, where we are, BT’s past with his previous pilot, or just chatter. Sometimes this is a little helpful in giving out information about what’s happening or the world we’re in but it’s never more than surface level. However I really do want to give praise to this mechanic. It feels similar to what we have in Firewatch but without the sharply written lines.
It’s clear Respawn wanted the player to bond with BT, and it sort of works. His eye/AI core looks a bit like the emotional cores from Portal 2 so I bet they tried to develop some level of personality to BT (with less emotive expression). But instead of looking at the radical development of an AI that potentially develops feelings like we see in something like Wall-E (something Respawn really missed the boat on here if you ask me) they just develop this relationship in moments. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Early interactions with BT establish that he’s not a personality core, he follows three directives and is kind of like EDI from Mass Effect: He’s straightforward and takes things literally. This leads to some dry jokes that I’ve already forgotten but others that work well. When BT suggested we take a shortcut is when we got separated and spent an entire mission trying to get back together. The next mission I took the dialog prompt in which Jack says, “Yeah let’s try not to get separated this time.” BT said, “Understood. No shortcuts.” I genuinely laughed.
Later when BT saved me from falling to my death over a ledge (something you can catch in the trailers) my character gives BT a thumbs up and in the following moments we see BT’s hands try to understand how to make a thumbs up and then execute it. It’s a wonderful moment where you don’t even realize what it is BT’s trying to do until you see the giant robot hand in the form he was trying to create. Across the rest of the game we see it multiple times and becomes a bit of the relationship’s hallmark, to the point where we see other robots doing it. Not bad Respawn. At one point in the game I joked to BT that instead of throwing a cable line into a building for me to zip-line to, maybe he should just throw me in next time. A mission or two later BT was actually fastball throwing me across a chasm. He says, “Trust me. I’ve done the math.” And yes, the fastball throw moments are exciting every time.
It happens a couple times throughout the plot and it adds this unique layer of physicality to the relationship between the Pilot and Titan. I once slid under BT and held the button to climb into him and he reached down with his arm and grabbed me up. Those moments never get old and take directly from a game that really did its animation and player camera work well. The second or third time BT fastballs me, I picked the dialog option of, “Just like before BT. Let’s do this.” And he tells me it won’t be. Because the math involved in this throw is way more complicated. There’s some moments of interaction between the Pilot and Titan in this game that, given some more work, could actually make this experience something worth a 12-hour experience.
The problem, unfortunately, is the dialog itself. I really hate to bash on voice acting as its a demanding field of work that is sadly underpaid right now and even lacking in recognition at times. Matthew Mercer is a good actor who has done tons of work including an acting role in the English dub of Kill la Kill. And yet Jack’s dialog is painfully stale and boring and lacking any response to the world around him. In the mission BT and I are separated, I’m shooting my way through waves of robots and sliding into buildings to avoid getting shot at by rockets. When BT tries to communicate with Jack via radio, Jack’s response of, “I’m kinda busy BT” just comes of as a read line, maybe slightly irritated. Later there’s a oil sludge wall keeping BT from giving me covering fire, leaving me to shoot waves of soldiers and small exploding spider bots on my own while I wait for a system to warm up. BT tells me he can’t shoot through the sludge because he can’t use his targeting system to see me or my enemies and risks hitting me. The response of “Just fire BT!” also comes off…as a read line. I’d be shouting at the top of my lungs during this stuff, even if I’m enclosed in a helmet. It pulls the player from the experience, which might be part of the reason why I’m not as attached to BT as the game wants me to be.
(SPOILERS FOLLOWING)
So no emotional development, lack of engaging world (pretty world though, jeez), and lack of emotional engagement with moment to moment experiences. It’s a wonder I didn’t choke when BT offs himself to ensure your safety and the success of your mission. Yeah, BT blows himself up. It wasn’t a surprise, it wasn’t a shock, and it wasn’t even emotionally heartwrenching. I’m not going to argue that there wasn’t enough TIME to develop the story here because Portal, Firewatch, and The Walking Dead can do in about 3–8 hours what games like Half-Life 2, Mass Effect, and (insert your emotional and long game here) can do in 12–50 hours. It’s about how things are developed, fleshed out, written, and performed. Firewatch sneaks its way through the emotional development by making sure players are engaged in important moments in a friendship. It’s in the subtle and carefully written development of characters that makes you shed a tear when stuff like this happens.
And those things can move people even when it’s your average blockbuster. By all standards, Mass Effect 3 is something we can dub a “Blockbuster RPG”. It’s a high budget video game RPG given a marketing campaign that reminds you of your recent Marvel movie release. What, you didn’t shed a tear or feel torn up or remorseful for that twist during Civil War?
But the hallmarks of why I’m not so crazy about your yearly Call of Duty storyline these days follow through with the hallmarks of what made Call of Duty such memorable games for me: The experiences, the sequences, the levels. Controversial as “No Russian” was, “All Ghillied Up”, the first level playing as a Soviet soldier in Call of Duty 1, and the nuke in Modern Warfare are prime examples of the developer either doing something ghastly and different just to get some attention or because the former Infinity Ward developers know it’s not enough to have 12 similar missions with little variety.
And being honest the set pieces in this game were the stuff that resulted in me walking to my fridge to get a refill and talking out loud in my house why this game’s story mode is really cool. Fighting up the bosses is intense and unique each time as every boss has a different weapon set to adjust to. One mission takes place on a ship flying its way across a planet. There could’ve been a bit more ship hopping but you’re exposed to danger and falling consistently. Another level takes place in the bowels of a communication base and you’re running long distances leaping from wall to wall before riding giant fans upwards into other rooms and using a power tool to activate walls to block the fan air from pushing you off railings. I’ve already mentioned the level taking place on several assembly lines. But the Respawn / Infinity-esque “unique mechanic” level that takes the cake here is a set of missions involving a time distortion device. I won’t spoil it further than that and it doesn’t change the entire game. But it’s a wonderful level or two that smartly allows the player to enjoy a plotline told in a unique and genius way if you’re asking me. That section of the game alone was worth the price of admission, in addition to how fun this game’s multiplayer is.
Look, Titanfall 2 is a really good game. Every time I jump in my Tone Titan I’m super excited, the gunplay is fun and it’s the best game to take some good mechanical influence from Call of Duty while being a lot more than just Call of Duty. It’d be a horrible crying shame to see Respawn Entertainment dissolved or have to close its doors because EA couldn’t possibly adjust the release window on it a little bit or give it some heavier marketing to ensure Battlefield 1 doesn’t overshadow it in sales this badly. I’m glad I bought it and the single-player mode is fun and will make for a good weekend game. I’m glad that the campaign isn’t everything that failed to keep my interest in Call of Duty years back. Games need more than just railroaded shooter experiences. I’m a bit perturbed that a story mode with this much to show and involve fails to deliver on some really important notes. But don’t let that stop you from grabbing the game if you’re interested. Titanfall 2 is really good, but I think we need to ensure Titanfall 3 happens if we want to see a package similar to what Call of Duty 4 was.
