Respawn Enertainment’s upcoming sci-fi shooter Titanfall may be a multiplayer-only title, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have some sort of story attached to all the action.
“Titanfall will most definitely have an ending. It’s not a story if it doesn’t have an ending, but there are multiple sides to that story,” said senior map designer Mohammad Alavi in an interview with XB1. “It’s told from both the Militia and IMC perspectives, and to fully grasp Titanfall’s campaign, you’ll need to play it from both sides. And as with any good story, we’ve hopefully peppered it with enough detail and nuance that you’ll notice something new every time you replay it.”
In Titanfall, the story will play out through the multiplayer campaign, as there is no traditional single-player experience as you’d find with most modern day shooters. Alavi talked about why the studio went this route and excluded Titanfall’s single player.
“Most consumers play the single-player campaign of any shooter only once, and then go on to play multiplayer for months or years,” he said. “Single player campaigns take hundreds of thousands of hours to develop, and with a team as small as ours we couldn’t afford to sink that kind of development time into a four to eight hour journey people will only play once. What we’re hoping to achieve is to take an exciting cinematic experience and weave it into multiplayer gameplay so compelling, that players will continue to be engrossed in the universe of Titanfall for months and years after its release.”
Alavi then went into more details, explaining exactly how the experience will play out when you boot up Titanfall for the first time.
“So we’ve only really spoken about one way to play Titanfall. That’s Campaign Multiplayer. You can join a lobby by yourself or with a party, but here’s where it gets different. You and your party or enlisted into a faction, either IMC or Militia. You’ll play the campaign and progress through the narrative hitting the missions in order until you’ve beaten the game on that faction. You’ll then have the option to play through again from the beginning on the other faction. Once you’ve beaten the game from both sides, you’ll be able to play any mission on either faction you like. There are traditional modes as well that you’d expect from a multiplayer FPS game and you can start playing those from the first time you run the game. No matter what you play, you earn XP and progress.”
Titanfall launches on the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC on March 11. A multiplayer beta before hand is still a possibility, but isn’t confirmed.
Source: XB1, via, Titanfall-Community.