Shacknews: What do you feel is the key to differentiating Titanfall 2's multiplayer from the original game?
Steve Fukuda, game director: After the original game, we sat down and looked at it objectively. We got a lot of feedback from the outside, from fans, from research saying, "Hey, there's not enough. There's not enough content. We want more content." Internally, we played the game and came out of the play session thinking, "That was super exhausting. That was super chaotic." Why is that? We struggled with trying to answer what it was.
What it came down to was, it was difficult for players to have a predictably unpredictable kind of experience. It was difficult for players to say, "If I die here in this game mode, how do I get better?" Do I zig? Do I zag? What should I have done differently? It was hard for Titanfall players to answer that through their experience. So we went back to the drawing board so we could fix this.
We started by addressing the fact that you move so fast. You can't shoot out of the air so easily. So we slowed things down just a touch. Then also thinking more in terms of having players more proactive decisions, so instead of reacting to everything, they're thinking more like, "This match and this mode, this map, etc." They go, what things in the loadout menu will best help me fulfill that purpose. There's a much greater sense of purpose for players, so now they are thinking in terms of planning ahead, in terms of "I want to do this. This is my goal, this is my identity of how I am as a player." There's a huge difference, because all the different modes now kind of necessitate the player proactively thinking about what they want to do.
Shacknews: How has your approach to map design changed from the previous game?
Fukuda: One of the big efforts there was trying to think of the degree of verticality, the sort of "swiss cheese" effect. But now we have a 3D "swiss cheese" effect. So we started thinking more in terms of simplifying the concept and using what the designers call a "window pane" effect, where we think in terms of lanes. Defined paths become the norm: the left, the middle, the right. There's a greater simplification of the player's understanding of the environment, so that the environment becomes more predictable and becomes less about just drawing lines across the map from any point to any point where it just becomes a mess. We're trying to make sure the level is designed in a way that gets these trendy routes and feels more fundamental.