GameSpot's The Lobby - Titanfall 2: Does it need a campaign?

[MUSIC] Titanfall 2, Titanfall has sold over ten million copies, so I guess a sequel was always on the cards. However there was this one sort of thing that people thought about the first game. They were like, it doesn't have a campaign. It's the folks who made Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare and a bunch of other great games, but they did have this thing called campaign multiplayer which sort of replaced this and got fed people into the multiplayer part of the game. So I guess this is kind of this thing now, now week or a couple days ago, one of the guys at Titanfall said that the Titanfall 2, whatever it's gonna be called, is going to have a traditional, I guess single player campaign. So i've asked both you guys, or got you both in here, to kinda talk about whether or not you think that's a good idea or not, whether you think it's worthwhile or not I guess. First of all, Aaron. Where do you sit on this? [COUGH] I really appreciated that Titanfall tried something different. I really like the fact that they integrated the two. Mm. They had the multiplayer campaign I mean, of course you have problems when you have player drop off and people trying to finish the campaign later on. That's something you can't get around, but my biggest problem with that was just they didn't commit enough to it. Not that it was there. There were moments in that one One. There's a mission on the Odyssey where this is the derelict ship where there's audio prompts talking about trying to start the ship back up. But the players were never fighting in the engine room. Or there was one called Three Towers, an airstrip where they were talking about following a blood trail. But you were never following the blood trail. So Like I love the idea. They just need to commit to the idea more so that players are doing the missions. And then there's a binary ending where there actually is the [UNKNOWN] win of the militia wins. Because the way that campaign ended was, they were like, you guys want some and we guys want some. [LAUGH] And now let's Go do multiplayer. Yes, see you at the next war. Jesse Stern said one of the shortcomings of the first game was that we just did not have the mechanism to tether everyone here. Here's who you are. Here's where you are and who's around you. We knew all the answers. We just could not deliver on it. There was the kind of smell of a really new game there or real new universe that you were part of. But like Iron said, you kinda never really got into it that much. Do you think A campaign would fix that or do you think they just kind of didn't execute on the campaign multi-player idea well enough? Well I think the campaign will inherently allow them to flush out the story and provide more context. I mean, that's a no brainer. You know, I think it's a worthwhile effort because it's a world that is somewhat interesting that has humans with abilities and robots they can interface with. That is not something you see in a lot of games, right? So to sort of describe the world around that and present it in a way that makes it even more interesting, would be a good move I think. But what I'm more interested in is rather than the online multi-player thing where they're talking about the story, so So much, it's using a focused design campaign to allow the mechanics to do some interesting stuff, that aren't possible in multiplayer. Right, [CROSSTALK] use to do? Yeah, build levels around the mechanics that you have at your disposal, to make some more interesting gameplay. Then just This is multiplayer that's addressed as Mm. You know, a story, or even just a single player campaign that is like you against bots, in a similar map or even a similar setup that you would face. Like, do something really cool that's different for multiplayer that's not just telling a tale. One of the things that sort of comes up whenever companies take on the whole single player thing is that, spending time on these like super focused, super content, heavy Development cycles for single pair campaigns might take a focus away from what otherwise would be done on multiplayer. Do you think they need to do much more with the multiplayer of this game? Cuz they kind of seem like they cracked the nut really well on the first time around. How much different gameplay do you need out of a Titanfall 2? It depends. I don't know how they, I can't speak to how limited they are on the technical side. Mm. But I can think of just off the top of my head of like, there's a lot that they could do with this game in terms of, when they release map packs the maps were always schematically connected. And things like actually having players go seamlessly from one map to the next map without loading screen where you play a series of maps that feed into each other. Or things like doing PVE in the PVP so there was a level called there be dragons. There are these giant dragons, and when you shot them they would just kind of fly off. Aggro on characters. So they could add PVE, there's I think that the sky is the limit on the universe was incredible, all of the maps told the story, and they could add mechanics if they wanted to, and if they had the technical capabilities, they could do it. And we got a bunch of feedback in on this one, and Phillipe [UNKNOWN] As put the question in here to some disappointments jan I dont buy multi player only full priced games anymore so this is totally worth it to me when it comes to the campaign in fact I actually put out a little twitter poll I got one half dozen votes 64% People said they were more likely to buy it if it had a campaign, with 34% basically saying it didn't really matter to them either way. That's kinda the thing, is that some people will pay a campaign, but we always hear anecdotally when it comes to games like Call of Duty, some people just don't care. So it's weird that you've got this split where some people Will love a campaign or they're kind of done with multiplayer-only games. And then these other people who are like, they think it's a waste of money, basically cuz they're never gonna spend time on it. People consider every game for many different reasons. Sometimes it's brand. Sometimes they wanna get Call of Duty because them and their friends always get the new Cal of Duty. And they're zombies. Madden. Madden, FIFA, same way. But at the same time if someone just wants a competitive experience, these days there are so many free to play competitive shooters that it's like, do I need to drop $60 just for that? I feel like for a lot of people it's gotta be a really compelling Game that has something really different, like Titan Fall did. Yeah. But now that Titan Fall has come out and we've seen that. If they're gonna come back again and charge full price, I think they have to do a campaign. You're a massive fan of Rainbow Six Siege. You've been playing a lot of it recently. That's a game that's multiplayer only. Has that soured at all? It has a situations mode, but. I have a hard time understanding how, I think single-player campaigns sell games and I think they look pretty, they can make them look pretty, they look great in advertisements. And I am not going to discount the people who genuinely love single-layer games, but if you look at Could be amount of time that you're gonna spend in a single player game, in a shooter, not in an RPG. You're gonna spend, let's just say maximum, 12 hours in the average game, 8 to 12 hours. And if this is an Infinity Ward thing, you could probably You know. It would be fair to say it's probably gonna be around five to six, right? You can easily spend a hundred hours, and that's not an exaggeration. Some people spend upwards of 200 hours in multiplayer. So if you're a developer and you're looking at the budget that it costs to put in a single-player campaign versus the people who are gonna spend a hundred or two hundred hours in your game, I find it hard to justify multi-player shooters wasting such a large portion of their budget when they could just use twice the maps, or put it into some fantastic destruction technology, or just a better looking game. If you look at the numbers on this poll I think that's a pretty good indication that the majority of people don't care so much that the campaigns are short. And that they're gonna get more value if they just play multiplayer a lot. I think it's a certain type of person that really just wants to do the multiplayer thing. And then there was 34% that didn't care either way so you can take that as, I enjoy the multiplayer a lot or You can take it the other way and say I don't care about single player. Like, it doesn't make a difference to me either way. So yeah, it's really strange. I had to say, when I said Infinity Ward, I meant the people who made those old Infinity Ward games. Of course there's always Respawn Entertainment, [INAUDIBLE] new thing. But I wonder if the fact that this game sold two million Copies, and it was an Xbox One exclusive. And now they're making a game that's gonna come out on PC and Playstation 4, as well as the Xbox One. Like, I wonder if that's the, like if they have a little bit more leeway, financially to sort of make it happen. And that maybe that this is their like, big play to take out Call of Duty, right? Like, I bet those guys would like nothing more than to take over Call of Duty's like, user market base or whatever, and I guess you're never going to do it unless you have a campaign. I guess you got to tick that box for some people.>>I'm not saying they couldn't do a really good campaign in this world and their map design for multi players were all fully fleshed out world. It's like you could walk around the map and you'd be like, here's where the ship's laying. Here's where the passport office, like here's where people live I mean, it was so clear when you played those maps of that, somebody actually sat down and wrote a story and then made the map, as suppose the vice versa. So, you know, I think, as they said, I think they knew what The world was and they made not about the budget to do the campaign. 'Cause, again like I thought I saw for a week reason they were saying is much as 75 % of their budget might going to. Okay. Single, single player campaign so, make sense if you're just trying to deliver this multiplayer shooter to the computer with call of duty. That you just spend the money on multiplayer and then if you Sell 10 million copies, hey we got the money, now let's make a campaign. I should mention as well as the [UNKNOWN] makes a good point in the [UNKNOWN] this game actually did come out on PC last time around. [CROSSTALK] And it came out on XBox 360 as well. It did. Awesome port, Bluepoint Productions, they did the port for that, they did the port for Gravity remastered. Really. They know your style SD collection, they're one of the best Studios out there that most people don't know about. On top of it. They're master porters. That's excellent. A bunch of people on the chat as well asking multiplayer online shooter world has changed a little bit. A lot more micro transactions now. Sort of par for the course. Titan Fall seemed to stay away from that for the most part. They have a season pass with some maps and stuff. What do you think about that? Do you think they'll dive into that? [UNKNOWN] They care about what their community thinks about them. When it comes to microtransactions if you make people care about your game they'll want to spend money and I think developers deserve to make money on the games that they release. I mean, the price of a game has been, what, $60 for a decade now. And a lot of reason why you are seeing crazy stuff like premium and power front launching with four signature maps per mode. I think their budgets are getting cut down by the fact that they are still selling games for 60 dollars and so i think at this point developers are either going to raise the price of games Do things like premium or do microtransactions. It doesn't seem like, just what I gather from talking to developers, is just doesn't seem like a $60 game is gonna cover their costs any more? So to me microtransactions are the lesser evil if they're done right. And if they're not cutting out contents And making you feel like you're not getting a good deal. If they're making you love the game and then they're giving you things that you want to buy because you love the game. Just as long as they're not taking away some of the fairness in it. I remember the burn cards they had in the first game. If you could suddenly just acquire a bunch of those FIFA style. I guess we'll find out. It depends. Most of it, a lot of Games have just gone vanity with it, which [CROSSTALK]. The debate is out this morning. In fact, there's gonna be a stream on right after this live show which Octave is gonna be playing the game. They've got a bunch of new skins and whatnot. I'm sure they're gonna start selling those bad boys too. There's egregious Preaches that, though. In Battlefront they sold the DL 44 blaster as Han Solo's blaster for $10 extra. $10? My god! And it was the highest level unlocked in the game, and ended up being the OP pistol that everybody hated. Really? So that was just totally egregious. That was just there. Yeah. Yeah like just throw grenade and close the door, kind of last [UNKNOWN] move. So I get why people are apprehensive when Microtransactions get kicked around. Yeah, can't trust them. Apart from that, though, last thoughts on this? Excited for Titanfall 2, Two-tanfall? Yeah. Respawn Entertainment is one of the few developers that I've spoken with in previews where a lot of developers give you their BS marketing push And you don't believe them, you learn not to believe them. These guys I thought that they were bs-ing me, and then they delivered this 636 Combat that I thought you couldn't do with mechs. And they had great mechanics like ejecting just to give you more time to play the game. A lot of the things that I thought they were bs-ing me on, I was totally wrong. They were absolutely right, and they knew what they were doing. So I'm excited to be proven wrong, if I'm doubtful of this game again. If that happens again, I will be very excited. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Peter, what about yourself? I'm very much excited. Titanfall is one of the best shooters, for me, in probably a decade or more. I love the new things they did, and I can't wait to see what else they have up their sleeve. I really want there to be New Titans that do some ridiculous **** and I'll be really happy. I guess it was one of the early games that came out on that next generation of consoles, the current gen now. It felt like it was like 80% of the way of being something super super special cuz it was really special but it was like [NOISE] You never like, a lot of sucker punches never came. I think it's and I hate to say the campaign is the most important thing cuz I don't think it is but when you really wanna identify with a world, like, you gotta struggle, you gotta succeed, you have to like go through, you know, what it means to be a person in that world, not just have someone in your ear telling you Hey, I just want to convince you that you are really here and that Yeah. you're part of this ****. You have to live and breathe it and do it. That should be really cool. If they can pull that off.>> Could be, could go either way. You never know. Like some games you play a lot multiplayer, some games you just play the campaign. Like I play Call of Duty and I don't ever the multi-player. I got Killzone and I don't ever played single player. I guess we'll see where this one lands. Let us know what you think, if you're excited? About the new Titanfall game, whatever it's gonna be called. Please call it Tootenfall. [LAUGH] Let us know in the comments. Hello. [MUSIC]