TITANFALL 2

How Respawn’s mech shooter got an unusual campaign

he process of making Titanfall 2’ s campaign sounds like a game jam to me. Twenty developers on the game’s design team would tackle the theme of building a weapon, level or feature for a singleplayer component with just one rule—it had to feel like Titanfall. That’s why you can still double jump, and why there are still big robots knocking around.

TSome of the quieter moments between the large-scale action are a little more unexpected. Platforming, puzzles and exploration in Titanfall? The previously online-only mech shooter? Sure, why not.

The team evolved a process of creating “little compartmentalized action blocks,” in the words of art director Joel Emslie, explaining the process during an interview at Gamescom. Here they could experiment. “One of the ones you actually see in that singleplayer [demo], was an action block where you’re moving panels on cranes, to solve a puzzle with wallrunning and double-jumping and things like that. There were over a hundred of those, and what you see now, and what you’ll end up seeing in Titanfall’s singleplayer, is the composition of those different action blocks, strung together in a really meaningful way that propels the story forwards.”

In the demo, they show off a section where you have to line up a series of platforms in the distance that your titan can then throw you towards, so you can wallrun to the next part of the world. In

It’s odd seeing stuff like this in the offshoot of a fast-paced arena shooter