As I settled down for my interview, Mohammad Alavi, the lead Single Player Designer at Respawn Studios, asks me what I thought of the 30 min Titanfall 2 single player demo I saw a little while ago. I honestly replied that I expected a lot of “boom and explosions” much like a Call of Duty game. Alavi simply laughs and asks with a genuine curiosity, “Why do people always say that?”. Respawn Entertainment is comprised of individuals who made Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1, the game that arguably kickstarted the FPS scene that we know today, so a story campaign with “boom and explosions” is to be expected. But Respawn argues - and insists - that Titanfall 2’s story mode is anything but. And while it wasn’t readily apparent from the demo, it says the story is unique and unlike anything we have seen before.

Respawn describes creating the story campaign as a “really chaotic experience internally”, especially since they had to scrap the story mode from the original game, and bin all of the previous ideas for the sequel. “When we started the campaign on the last game, you can't even compare the two,” Alavi explains. “Because we didn't know what we were making, that's why we scrapped it. We had to go make something unique, and we came up with Titanfall. So after that, whatever ideas we had [for Titanfall 1 single player] they were all gone!” Once Respawn decided how Titanfall would look and play like, they set out to make a story campaign that would “make the design of Titanfall mechanics shine,” Alavi says. “We basically were like, ‘Okay, we have this really great foundation, with all these gameplay mechanics, and this universe. How do we take this gameplay and make a single player game out of it?’ Because you can’t just pick it up, plop it down with a bunch of explosions in a hallway, you know what I mean? [Laughs] That’s not going to work.”

Tear It Down and Start Again

With Titanfall 2, the developers saw it as an opportunity to narrow down and utilize the already established universe of the game to create an intimate and personal story, one that’s peppered with “lots of downtime” and navigational puzzles, instead of a constant cacophony of gunfire and door breaches. “What we ended up with actually is a very varied and long experience were you hit on all these different aspects of what makes Titanfall feel like Titanfall, and all the different things you can do in the game, and all the different abilities, and the connection between you and your Titan, as well as the narrative,” Alavi says.

“It was a very long process. We definitely came up with the gameplay first, figure out what kind of game we wanted to make, what a Titanfall level is like, and ironically, I still can’t point to one level and say, ‘That’s a Titanfall level!’. Because the reality is I have to point to seven or eight different levels and be like, ‘Alright, that’s what a Titanfall level is,” he adds.

In Titanfall 2, you play as Jack Cooper, a riflemen in the Milita who aspires to be a pilot and have his own Titan. The demo that I saw was strung-together gameplay clips of the beginning and middle of one of the earlier missions from the game. Cooper blasts off from space on a mission along with Captain Lastimosa to Forwardbase Kodai, a desolate operations base overrun by the IMC. The space pod comes crashing down on hostile territory with a bunch of very angry-looking dinosaur-like creatures clicking at your heels. Things go south from there, where Lastimosa loses his life but not before injecting you with a serum to keep you safe, and also entrusting you with his companion and compadre, a Titan called BT. As the only person alive to complete the mission, Cooper buries the Captain and dons his helmet which provides you with an HUD and also establishes a direct communication link between you and BT.

Respawn says the gameplay in the story campaign is based on three pillars: pilot combat, pilot mobility and Titan combat. You see these elements in action as you snake your way across to the base to find a battery pack for your Titan, because even they run out of charge (sadly no futuristic space wireless charging for them yet). You move through a lush jungle which provides you with the perfect gym to practice Titanfall’s fluid jetpack mechanics to leap across hills, slide on sign boards, and use pilot abilities like cloaking to pick off enemies with ease. This particular part reminded of the original Crysis, only with a lot less greenery and sans a Nanosuit.

Once you acquire the battery pack things truly start to get interesting, at least gameplay wise. Once BT is up and running again, you are tasked to establish a neurolink with the Titan, which creates a bond between the pilot and their gigantic metal killing machine. It is also part of the three protocols a Titan must follow, Respawn’s own spin on the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ by Isaac Asimov, but only less complex. A Titan must follow these rules, and in this particular order: establish a link with the pilot, uphold the mission, and then, protect the pilot. I can already see Respawn playing with these rules later on in the game, where the Titan might itself have to decide if following these protocols would be the best option to take.

A Man and His Beast

The relationship that the player will share with BT is what will make the underlying story of Titanfall 2, and give the game that personal feel the developers are going for. “The depth, the soul and the heart of the narrative comes in the conversation you have with BT,” Alavi elaborates. “The pilot is a badass, the Titan is a badass, and a game with any one of them would be badass, but together they are like this unstoppable force. So we wanted to bring that feeling to the single player and just 10x-it.”

One of the obvious ways to go about this is to give BT its own voice and personality. The Vanguard class Titan is not just capable of unleashing devastating ordnance at enemies, but also able to carry out proper conversations that allows its own distinct character to shine through. “And once we had that, we started down this whole path with dialogues and narration, with BT developing his own character, as well as the character of Jack Cooper,” Alavi adds. “And then the only real way to tell this story arc is the dialogue between the two and how the relationship changes from the beginning of the game versus the end of the game.”

If you have played Campo Santo’s excellent Firewatch, you have an exact idea of how these conversations between you and BT will be carried out. During the game’s many downtimes, a conversation with BT will often present you with two separate dialogue options to choose from - selecting either of them changes how you interact with BT and what kind of information and personality you draw from it. And to be honest, it was these interactions that were the best part of the demo that I saw.

One such example comes when a little further on in the mission, you are tasked to acquire a module to fix a beacon located at the top of a mountain. With no direct path to the platform you need to be on, BT offers to physically throw you at its direction with a calculated 68% chance of survival. Hesitant to jump on the extended arm of the robot ready to shot-putt him towards the platform, Cooper inquiries about the rest of the 32% of his survival chances. BT starts to list of things like broken bones, permanent paralysis, dis-figuration, disembowelment, and more, of the potential things that could go wrong if he doesn’t land safely. The scene works better when you watch it, instead of me explaining it here, but it got a chuckle out of the entire room when the sequence played out. However, what happens after that is what truly highlights what this BT and player relationship with entail. As Cooper readies himself on BT’s arm, the Titan gently leans in and whispers simply, “Trust me”, as he hurls him towards the beacon.

However, unlike Firewatch, Titanfall 2 will not have branching storylines or multiple endings. “The player does have many, many choices to make. But if you are talking about branching paths, there are none of them,” Alavi says. “There’s a lot of choice there, and there are lot of branching conversations there. Choices that you make in the conversation will change some of the questions you can ask or things you can say to BT later on. So there’s that. [But] it won’t be like you make a choice here, and you would have gone to play level 2 but now you can’t and have to go play level 3. That’s not going to happen.”

The demo only showcased a small part of what’s to come, as we still don’t have any idea of the overall story that powers Titanfall 2’s single player campaign. However, at the end of the demo, Respawn left us with a bit of a teaser where Cooper is stuck in some sort of a time warp where everything is simply frozen. Cooper walks through a scene where BT is running away from a massive explosion in the background, with enemies and some sort of a structure suspended in the air mid-destruction.

What I saw of Titanfall 2’s story wasn’t even remotely enough to say that it will come close to Repsawn’s previous works, however the bond between BT and the player will be an interesting thing to explore. The developers insist that they have something special on their hands, and the passion with which they talk about it is almost infectious to a point where I want to believe them. But we will have to see how the demo stacks up to the final game when it releases on October 28 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.