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I ended up feeling that Titanfall was worth my $50, but I can certainly understand why others wouldn't. These days, I just don't get into competitive first person shooters anymore, and this was the first one in a while that grabbed me for more than a cursory, 5-hour, "this is kind of interesting" thing. It's also the first game I've ever prestiged in, though that might be just because the treadmill is significantly shorter than the average CoD game.

 

The map pack may have been a stupid purchase, but I got it for 1/2 off so no big deal.

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Hopped back in last night after the chatter started up again here.  The rank system is confounding, though I'm sure makes sense to people who aren't still in their first generation (almost to 48!).

 

Surprised that they show the global playing count.  Just under 700 playing attrition world-wide around 9pm PST, which is pretty good considering Europe and the east coast should be in bed.

 

Felt like the same old Titanfall. Though, Destiny's Hunter double-jump is bigger than Titanfall's which took time re-acclimating.  Killing grunts is still very satisfying.

 

Even though I never fell in love with the game, I'm not mad about the pricing scheme.  Just hope they learn their lesson from Evolve and make the maps free for the sequel and charge $20 per extra Titan.  :P

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I value differences of opinion of issues such as these. That said, I want to express how mine differ.

Out of the gate, I felt there were a handful of poor choices. The number of weapons felt low to me, especially the ones that actually felt effective against other competent players.

I think the (comparatively) low number of weapons was a great design choice. I still don't understand why there are two SMGs. What I like about the amount of customizable weapons is that I can wrap my head around them enough to switch them out between games and have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. All the weapons (except from the SMGs) feel distinct from each other while in games like the COD Modern:Warfare series the differences seem to be in things like having a slightly shorter clip in exchange for slightly less kick or whatever. I understand that discovering, debating, and optimizing that minutiae is something that others value, but Titanfall's customization is just as far as I have interest in going. That stuff takes time and effort to sift through and I often feel that I've just made a bad weapon because I don't know what I'm doing. That's fine because I can change it right? Well the reality of that is that I get tired of changing all that stuff around on a single primary weapon and then I just stop changing it when I find something that works. Titanfall's customization system is prioritized to be clear, fast, and noticiably consequential when any change is made. More options is not always a good thing.

Besides that consider the scale of variety in weapons, abilities and titans within their classes. The smart-pistol encourages wildly different play that the SMGs. Chosing to use the Guardian Chip instead of the Minion Detector feels like a drastic move. For me, the customization balances well between managable without being obsessive and various enough where I can make builds that play much differently. I've clocked 148 hours and it was just this morning that I discovered how effective the Arc-Cannon is in Attrition. It's a chain-lightning gun; how did I miss that? I've gone through a chain-gun phase, a triple-threat phase, a 40mm-Cannon phase, and I will never touch that Rail-Gun again (Gen3 FOR LIFE!)

Burn Cards felt mostly irrelevant, which Respawn must have agreed with since they fixed them by removing/adding cards and creating an economy for them.

I think the Burn Card design is brilliant. What it does is give you a chance to raise the ante on individual lives. I've never activated a spare-titan or rematch card casually; It's an excellent way to allow for a power-up but maintaining fairness. It can be tedious to re-queue them though and I have gone multiple games having used none because I didn't want to pick any out. They fixed that though, you can select an option where it just re-queues them for you between matches.

The Titans never felt properly balanced to me - early on, there were plenty of Hardpoint and CTF matches that I lost because the enemy team would capture the flag once and then put all 6 of their Titans on the flag with AoE weapons that didn't let you get close. From everything I've heard, there was a relatively abrupt inflection point where Titans instead became useless as their counters and player behavior were "figured out". Granted my long-term knowledge about this game is mostly anecdotal (I have played a few times in the past 6 months, but not many), it seems to me that Respawn hasn't gone to great lengths to reverse this.

Give me some arc-grenades, cloak, a titan-drop and a shotgun and I can get through that line and bring you back a flag.

I feel as though Titanfall was simply a case of confirmation bias. We knew that the people at Respawn were capable of making a great game and when they only gave us a good one we really just wanted to believe it was great. I think it bore out throughout the year as the game had almost no continuing buzz and very little attention in GOTY proceedings (this surely is partly to do with bias towards more recently released games, but I still find it relevant).

I understand that this is a personal hypothesis for you, but it doesn't ring true to my experience at all. Titanfall IS a great game as far as I'm concerned. I have a ton of fun losing and I have a ton of fun winning. That's a huge accomplishment! While the studio's experience was obviously necessary for them to execute on this so well, I don't feel that I like the game because of Respawn's reputation. If that was the case, I would like at least one Blizzard game.

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You hit it right on the head, I really do appreciate the minutiae of weapon customization in FPS games. The reason I mentioned the weapons specifically is because having those gradations of specs makes it possible for someone like me to be a sniper. I feel like I could never effectively snipe in Titanfall despite how much I tried because there was always a master-level sniper out there and I couldn't rely on a differentiated weapon to help me. The Longbow and Kraber just weren't what I wanted, they both had immense recoil that I could never overcome plus fire speed on both of them was really low (naturally for the bolt-action Kraber, oddly high for the semi-auto Longbow). In COD when I'm facing someone that's amazing with a sniper, I could potentially have a chance with a low-damage rifle that requires two or three shots to kill but has low recoil and fast fire rate. That weapon just didn't exist in Titanfall and it made that "class" unplayable for me.

 

And not to be rude, but it did occur to me to try out strategies like cloaking and grenades against Titans but getting by six was nigh impossible for me without a coordinated effort from everyone one of my team members to attack and defend which almost literally never happens. I consider myself good at shooters and that scenario was a nightmare for me.

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If you still have the game I recommend trying Capture-The-Flag these days. These noobs are easily distracted.

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They brought it back? I basically decided to be done with it after they took out CTF the first time.

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You hit it right on the head, I really do appreciate the minutiae of weapon customization in FPS games. The reason I mentioned the weapons specifically is because having those gradations of specs makes it possible for someone like me to be a sniper. I feel like I could never effectively snipe in Titanfall despite how much I tried because there was always a master-level sniper out there and I couldn't rely on a differentiated weapon to help me. The Longbow and Kraber just weren't what I wanted, they both had immense recoil that I could never overcome plus fire speed on both of them was really low (naturally for the bolt-action Kraber, oddly high for the semi-auto Longbow). In COD when I'm facing someone that's amazing with a sniper, I could potentially have a chance with a low-damage rifle that requires two or three shots to kill but has low recoil and fast fire rate. That weapon just didn't exist in Titanfall and it made that "class" unplayable for me.

 

And not to be rude, but it did occur to me to try out strategies like cloaking and grenades against Titans but getting by six was nigh impossible for me without a coordinated effort from everyone one of my team members to attack and defend which almost literally never happens. I consider myself good at shooters and that scenario was a nightmare for me.

 

You couldn't effectively snipe in Titanfall because the developers are smart and wise (in this respect) and made everyone too mobile to both snipe effectively and remain stationary. Eliminating sniper rifles is the greatest gift a developer can give.

 

 

I think my anti-map pack stance has made me seem a detractor of Titanfall. I LOVE Titanfall. This game's fuckin' awesome. Especially because I can go kill all the snipers. I prestiged 5 times before it made me use the arc cannon on the titan.

I also found there was a significant difference between the R-97 and the CAR. Specifically, the CAR SMG was actually good.

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 I prestiged 5 times before it made me use the arc cannon on the titan.

This is exactly where I am, and have been, for about 9 months.

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You couldn't effectively snipe in Titanfall because the developers are smart and wise (in this respect) and made everyone too mobile to both snipe effectively and remain stationary. Eliminating sniper rifles is the greatest gift a developer can give.

 

 

I think my anti-map pack stance has made me seem a detractor of Titanfall. I LOVE Titanfall. This game's fuckin' awesome. Especially because I can go kill all the snipers. I prestiged 5 times before it made me use the arc cannon on the titan.

I also found there was a significant difference between the R-97 and the CAR. Specifically, the CAR SMG was actually good.

 

But they didn't "eliminate" sniper rifles. I don't know how you can simultaneously praise the lack of efficacy of sniper rifles and call the developers smart and wise (I may be taking this too literally). Either they designed the game poorly and included weapons that just aren't good due to the mechanics of the game, or they accidentally designed the game well by your estimation and included sniper rifles just to taunt players who want to use them. In either case, I don't really think it's a sign of good design.

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On sniper rifles:

If I want to do well in Attrition, I'm not going to use a sniper rifle, but it is a nice little break to use a sniper rifle for a while and just shoot grunts from a nice vantage point.

On challenges that are so distasteful that you will never advance:

I just saw that the Black Market allows you to buy your way past a single challenge for a lot of in-game currency. If I didn't take pride in my Gen3-status, I might do that, but I just ended up buying all the AI voices becUse there is something oddly relaxing about listening to people speak to me in languages I don't understand.

On map-packs splittng the community:

Yup. It was a bone-headed move.

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I just saw that the Black Market allows you to buy your way past a single challenge for a lot of in-game currency. 

 

That's really good to know. You guys are doing a good job of convincing me to come back and give this game another shot.

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But they didn't "eliminate" sniper rifles. I don't know how you can simultaneously praise the lack of efficacy of sniper rifles and call the developers smart and wise (I may be taking this too literally). Either they designed the game poorly and included weapons that just aren't good due to the mechanics of the game, or they accidentally designed the game well by your estimation and included sniper rifles just to taunt players who want to use them. In either case, I don't really think it's a sign of good design.

 

You're taking it too literally. I'm being silly. I dislike the gameplay that is derived from sniper rifles, so any game that deemphasizes or marginalizes them is in my good graces.

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Thanks for posting that.  I saw the article this morning re: only xbox360 and xbone maps for free.  Happy to see that PC is on the list now, too!  Time to dip my feet back in, especially since for the next week we'll probably see a much higher number of players.

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It'll be nice to play capture the flag on the new maps. I go through phases. I'm currently in a capture the flag phase. It's really fun, I've started to figure out that capture the flag is more about controlling bases and routes than being sneaky sneakster.

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Titanfall 2 is a Day one purchase for me. All the changes they've made show they really understand what was lacking in the first one. 

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I'm surprised that the free DLC has had no effect on the population for the PC. It is still a nice move though because I like being able to play Capture the Flag on the weekends and sometimes during the evenings.

In other news, I've started using the Large Machine Gun with arc-mines and Icepick. Staying on the edge of the map and unloading full LMG magazines while my army and mines protect my back is a fun, novel way to play the game. It's really more of a support/aggro role that requires another teammate to run around with a smart-pistol to take out all the minions, but it's fun.

Also, also I'm 10 doomed titans with my railgun away from Gen 4. I never thought it would happen, but I'll probably be regenerating this weekend.

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I rediscovered Hardpoint today. I have literally never seen some of these places on the maps.

I keep think of Dewar saying that the second Titanfall game is a day-one purchase and I'm really feeling that right now. I don't know how I'll feel whenn it comes out, but right now, I can't wait to see improvements and enjoy that initial hype again.

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Yesterday I played a lot of Titanfall. It was so much fun. I have a particular, very fast-paced way of playing. I'm trying to get better at establishing control over important areas. This typically involves the infrared-vision thing and arc grenades. It's really fun to set up a little base and recruit spectres. Sometimes I want to not care as much about winning as I do. There are some goofy ways to play that aren't necessarily optimal. Sniping grunts is a good example.

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Yesterday I played a lot of Titanfall. It was so much fun. I have a particular, very fast-paced way of playing. I'm trying to get better at establishing control over important areas. This typically involves the infrared-vision thing and arc grenades. It's really fun to set up a little base and recruit spectres. Sometimes I want to not care as much about winning as I do. There are some goofy ways to play that aren't necessarily optimal. Sniping grunts is a good example.

 

Clinging to walls and doing other Ninja crap can really help hold down a point as well.

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