Titanfall 2 proved Respawn knows the power of a great middle eight
Gah, really. EA has reportedly cancelled a single-player game set in the Titanfall/Apex Legends universe. Bloomberg broke the news and it settled on the office here like a chilly winter fog. Everybody shivered and felt a bit grimmer about things.
Thoughts, firstly and most importantly, to all concerned. Even outside of the job shakeups, it’s just horrible, I imagine, to have so much creative effort, so much hope, disappear in a single moment. And thoughts to Respawn as a wider entity too. Because this team is absolutely staggeringly good at single-player games, and here’s one we won’t get.
Inevitably, it sent me back to thoughts of Titanfall 2 and its glorious campaign. And this is the thing: it’s not the thought of the loss of another game in this world that’s so upsetting to players, I suspect. It’s the loss of another single-player game by this team that knows how to make single-player campaigns sing.
I didn’t go back to the game itself, but I think I will tonight. My first thoughts were of memory, where Titanfall 2 lives, and it lives particularly well. Some games are just made for memory aren’t they? They settle into such lovely, vibrant shapes. When I think of Titanfall 2 there are hundreds of great memories to think of – the classic time-flipping all-but-Super-Mario level, of course, the level where a house gets built around you as you move through a factory, the sheer fact that this game made being outside the giant mech as much fun as being inside it. But one memory always stands out over all others.
It’s the bit where your friend tells you he has a gun in his head. An absolutely brilliant gun.
So. In my memory, this comes at the end of act two-ish or around there. It’s the low point of the game. (Maybe it’s early act three.) Your Titan buddy has been gravely injured and you’re stuck inside enemy territory. It’s the bit in a game like this where the enemies are overwhelming and everything around you is starting to blow up. (It’s definitely act three isn’t it.) Anyway, this is the point where a lesser game would become exhausting, where it would decide that the game should just get harder and harder and more aggressive until the end credits.
