Here's an article I never expected to write.
Titanfall has shown, or more specifically re-enforced, one of my favorite things about video games; a unique and engaging method of storytelling. Even though it's not a particularly great story, or well executed, or ever beyond standard sci-fi tropes, I enjoyed it for other reasons I'll get to in a moment.
First, let me say that as a happy owner of a Wii U and PS4, I'm not impressed with the Xbox One. I've thoroughly enjoyed the 360's run beginning at launch, so admittedly I had hoped the successor would step into some big shoes and start walking. Instead, it has tripped, fallen, and at times stumbled backwards. Frequent hard-lockups, crashes on the dashboard, features winking out without notice, and occasional trouble just signing in to the system (all with Kinect disabled) lead me to worry I received a bum system. Chatting with other Xbox One owners has confirmed that, unfortunately, this is the current reality of owning a system that often doesn't play multi-platform games with parity. I have little doubt most issues will be resolved over time and once a new
Halo and
Gears of War are released, I'll be thrilled to already own a One. In the meantime, let's just say I'm glad I got rid of a stack of undesirables to pick this up.
But
Titanfall! Since I don't have a PC capable of running it, I'm glad I can enjoy it on a new system (when it doesn't crash.) And it really is fun, if not revolutionary. While 'twitch' FPSs aren't normally my style, somehow
Titanfall invokes that old
Unreal Tournament meets
Tribes feel mixed with a bit of
MechWarrior. It has a far lower human player count than even the first
Quake, and after the massive scale of
Battlefield 4 I assumed that would disappoint me, but it has actually somewhat worked in its favor. I'm not usually that great at these games and I only have a few hours a week during my workouts to get any better. Having less aggressive AI bots I can conquer lets me contribute and lessens frustration. Especially after suffering a dozen deaths from a human who can play more in a day than I have all week. Even with up to 40 bots in the match, it still feels much smaller in scale than
Battlefield, and it doesn't generate that 'huge war campaign' feel that would draw me more into the game, but it's still plenty fun.
Initially the lack of single player, online-only multiplayer design greatly diminished my interest in the game. I certainly understand the design intent after reading the developer interviews; why spend thousands of man-hours of work on an experience that only lasts a few hours and many players won't bother with, instead of investing that effort on the experience most will spend dozens or hundreds of hours in? Even as the weirdo who picked up the
Call of Duty games to go through the campaign and some zombies mode, the rationale made sense. When Respawn Entertainment announced the intent to actually have a story that plays out during the multiplayer matches, I was very curious how that was going to work.
Turns out, I loved how it worked.
Make no mistake; as I mentioned before, I didn't find the actual story well written. It had much more potential, and had it focused on explaining and exploring the man/machine or rebels/corporation dichotomy, it could have perhaps given something to hang its narrative hat upon. Instead the story is designed so that it is obvious who the good or bad guys are at all times, and the only motivations mentioned are greed, one-upmanship, and survival. We're not exactly expecting Asimov or even JJ Abrams here, but between the strategy guide and art book there are hints of a much greater and better told story that got watered down to the point of nonsense before release. In fact, that sums up the whole game rather well; it feels like a prologue to serve a far larger universe. It is assumed that was Respawn's intent all along, and I for one hope the inevitable sequels give better story treatment to what can be developed into an interesting sci-fi universe.
All that being said, it is the success of the narrative's transmission that surprised me. Most of the time if a video game is interested in its own story, it communicates by highjacking Hollywood's playbook of show-to-tell. Cut scenes, stilted narration, and unsubtle plot expositions are the order of the day. The player is the action star, but the attention is often yanked away from the controller as soon as 'story' has to be served. The player watches another storyboard, and is then unceremoniously dumped back into 'action' mode. The greatest and most unique feature video games offer, interactivity, is ignored as the player has to observe from a distance instead of staying in the game.
It's disjointing, and as great games have shown, unnecessary. One of the best recent examples has been
Portal and its sequel. The building of the narrative is firmly established through player interaction and progression. There are no need for lengthy expositions or show-stopping cut-scenes. Such would ruin the well-constructed mood and rhythm the games masterfully construct.
Titanfall does have a few cut-scenes, but almost all of the narrative is radio chatter and in-game events. The game doesn't hijack the player's attention, even as important events are unraveling. Heroes die, armies are abandoned, and alliances change, all from the prospective of an elite but nameless soldier/pilot caught in the conflict. The delivery of how it all happens makes sense; as I read in one review, this must be how the marines in
StarCraft feel as we give them marching orders to their doom. The campaign of
Titanfall feels more involved, in a sense, because the illusion of player agency is not enforced. You really are just another grunt, albeit a higher-ranking grunt, fighting in a war of far greater scale than you are going to single-handedly impact. Sure, a battle's success can fall on you besting the enemy human players, but you're never the 'named' hero of either side. Those characters, shallow as they come across, are the real movers and shakers of the game's universe, and you never control them. Design parameters dictate that your successes and failures in-game do not substantially change the story outcomes. This breakdown in fundamental player agency usually works against a game, dispelling the illusion of control.
However, in an industry that brags about games that are shaped by the illusion of player agency, there is something refreshing and arguably more engaging about being a mostly normal guy fighting in the trenches instead of tomorrow's superhero. Sure, the AI grunts on your side can be overheard speaking in awe about the 'Pilot' ranking soldier amongst them, but the game's important characters more or less treat you as another soldier with a job to do. In this way the narrative is not embracing the idea that the player is in control, but instead using the interactive nature of a game to immerse the player in a story that is being told around him.
Of course many, many other games have taken this approach.
Call of Duty sort of started to do this, but as the series progressed the named soldiers the player controlled grew into legendary super-soldiers and the story of the whole franchise grew more silly with each entry. It's no coincidence that the first
Modern Warfare was my favorite; it came closest to feeling like you were a normal soldier (with, um, unexplained Wolverine-like healing) caught in a world-changing war instead of a Michael Bay movie. Even compared to the first
Modern Warfare,
Titanfall feels like a slightly newer progression because instead of a completely scripted, handheld single player experience,
Titanfall uses the competitive multiplayer environment to the same effect. The result feels even less like watching an action movie and more like a form of virtual role-playing. The game-master has control of the story, but the players have freedom with some virtual toys within the framework.
There's also something engaging about replacing the role of hero with more normal characters caught in an epic web. One of my favorite
Halo games is the underrated
ODST. While it had cut-scenes and narrative shifts, it used them to tell the story of relatively normal marines and their different adventures that paralleled each other before meeting up at the end. It certainly wasn't anything new. But the noir style of the art, lighting and setting, and excellent soundtrack combined with the story of average-joe soldiers just trying to survive the invasion of Earth, made the experience far different than Master Chief's save-the-world-again-today missions. For all the players complaining that
Halo's mostly-silent leading man had no personality, it seemed even more of them complained that they didn't want to play as random, talkative soldiers. While I enjoyed every
Halo campaign, I consider
ODST to be a very successful experiment of short-stories in a grander narrative universe.
As for
Titanfall, even though the story itself didn't do much for me, the manner in which it was told allowed me to feel much more invested. In every review I've read, if the story is even mentioned, it's to reference how throwaway and non-existent it is. While I understand where the critique is coming from, I ended up with a different takeaway. It felt within context that the campaign was transpiring regardless if my mercenary or rebel cared. I enjoyed the feel of not being the hero, but someone a touch more relatable fighting alongside the heroes. As starships exploded above and martyrs changed the outcome I couldn't, it was easier to enjoy my role as a guy doing what he could. As the radio chatter provided the vast majority of narrative, it felt natural that I would struggle to catch every detail in the middle of fighting for my life, instead of pausing the action so story could be shoehorned into my experience. It felt more immersive. And in a game where my giant robot can punch into the cockpit of a rival's giant robot and toss the pilot aside, immersion is a quality I appreciate.
