Titanfall is a game built to thrive online, pitting humans and machines against each other in multiplayer battle, but that doesn't mean that developer Respawn Entertainment tossed aside the game's story. Titanfall will include a campaign designed to be played twice and tell its story from both sides of the conflict.
In response to a question posted
on Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb's website about losing interest in multiplayer-only games, Respawn Community Manager Abbie Heppe explained how Titanfall's "campaign multiplayer" will unfold from two angles. On one side are the citizen mercenaries in the
Frontier Militia. On the other, the
Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation, Titanfall's omnipresent industrial conglomerate.
Titanfall's campaign will take place outside the game's "classic modes." Designed to be short on story, these are what Respawn is showing off in
the current beta.
"With the campaign multiplayer, you'll play once through as the IMC and once through as the Militia," Heppe wrote. "Because it's a multiplayer game, it's always moving. It'll start out with these scripted sequences, and there'll be way more dialog and characters and way more context for the world than you would otherwise get in the classic modes, but it's not a single-player game. It is still a multiplayer game with story elements woven in."
Respawn's goal, according to Heppe, is to give Titanfall's multiplayer as much attention as some devote to single-player campaigns.
"So when we talk about the game having single player elements, one of the things we're really talking about is the quality of what you're seeing in multiplayer," she wrote. "It doesn't get done a lot, because normally you're saving the high-quality art, animation, everything like that for the single-player and scripted portions of the game. For us, we're trying to get that attention to detail and those big, epic moments and that really cinematic stuff, but have it happen in multiplayer."
According to Heppe, the combination of a campaign that gives context to Titanfall's universe and the multiplayer's high production values combine to deliver players unique stories.
"So, doing things like having those cool animations where the Titans reach and grab you out of the air or slide through their legs or getting on their back and rodeo-ing them, all of these are part of the way that you're going to weave that experience where you come out of that and you're going to have your own story. That's one of the consistent things when people play, they come out of it and say, 'So, I did this thing and then I did this other thing and then this cool thing happened!' That's you building your own story within the story that we're giving you context for."