It’s easy to forget just how good a game Respawn Entertainment gave us with Titanfall. Its now-regularly imitated movement was fluid, freeing, and incredibly satisfying. Its dramatic sense of scale was unique in that size never really equated to power. Fighting a titan as a pilot was exhilarating, and terrifying, but actually feasible. To Respawn’s great credit, it squared tiny, nimble pilots against hulking, robotic superweapons, and if you had a basic grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of each, you were in for a fairly even fight.

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The Story So Far

“ If you need a Star Wars filter, the IMC is the Empire, and the Militia is the Rebel Alliance.

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Why Go It Alone?

“ We got a lot of feedback that people liked what they saw of Titanfall, but they were really scared.

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“ We've all been influenced by Half-Life and Bioshock.

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The Building Blocks of Titanfall

“ In the end, the team broke it down to the basics. What makes Titanfall fun?

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A Grand Campaign

But it's easy to forget how good Titanfall was, because Titanfall absolutely had its glaring problems. Its lack of a dedicated campaign alienated a cross section of players. Its multiplayer lacked the kind of depth shooter aficionados had come to expect. And maybe most importantly, though not a fault of its own, it was initially an Xbox One exclusive at a time when many hadn’t bought into the new console generation, and further still, were lukewarm to Microsoft’s tumultuous messaging. Though accompanied by a Microsoft Windows and 360-port, its fractured player base quickly dwindled on each version.Yet, thankfully, here we are on the cusp of a sequel to this deeply rewarding, deeply troubled game. I’ve already shared my hopes for a Titanfall sequel . And of the many things that are changing this time around, the one I want to talk about is its ambitious new single player campaign. I was fortunate enough to spend a day at Respawn Entertainment’s studio, getting a brief glimpse of how that campaign will look, feel, and why it’s being taken very, very seriously.And that, in a nutshell, is where Titanfall 2 picks up. There’s more under the surface that I won’t go into for the sake of spoilers, but I left genuinely wondering what Respawn had up its sleeve. There’s a clear twist somewhere deep in the narrative revolving around this planet the Militia ship has crashed into, and the potential of BT-7274. But at its heart, it's a story about the two protagonists working together in a partnership that’s not only unlikely, but apparently against the rules."We got a lot of feedback that people liked what they saw of Titanfall, but they were really scared," said Titanfall 2 producer Drew McCoy. "'Multiplayer is too competitive. I'm not very good. I even like the universe but I want to be able to take it in at my own pace.'"In the original Titanfall, players' only chance to uncover more of the story came from jumping into competitive mulitplayer matches where, to put it bluntly, they were forced to square off against other players who could absolutely shut them down and stymy any chance they had to uncover what the hell the point of this whole conflict had to do with them.That's where Titanfall 2's single player campaign became not only a necessity, but requirement in making a connection to the game that was more than headshots and kill sprees."It's a good opportunity for people who aren't great at multiplayer to still be able to enjoy that design of the pilot ability, the Titan ins-and-outs, all that stuff, without the stress of multiplayer," said McCoy. "We wanted to have them feel like they got the experience of Titanfall without having to go online."But crafting that kind of a campaign meant creating an experience that was more than just a grind through the unlockable guns and gadgets the Titanfall universe had to offer. In the time between what Respawn Entertainment had created with Titanfall, tastes in a singular experience had come full circle."I think having made as many games as some of the people on the team have, we start to look for opportunities to stretch our limbs and make something that would excite us," said Titanfall 2 designer Mackey McCandlish. "We've all been influenced by Half-Life and Bioshock and didn't really have the opportunity to bring that level of pacing and player-centric conflict to games like Call of Duty that are so much about a squad. So this was a really great opportunity to stretch our limbs.""I think for a while people thought that you needed an MMO experience and loot to be single player. There is sort of trendline into Destiny, The Division, and Borderlands. And I think in recent times with Doom, and maybe Wolfenstein before that, people have started to say, 'No no, we did like this other thing that was totally just about you and not about grinding.' I think it's something that we do well so we're bringing that to Titanfall."The biggest obstacle for Respawn Entertainment was translating the frantic pace of Titanfall into something driven by narrative to create a single player experience. On the outset, you could see the difficulty. Titanfall is very much about speedy pilots maneuvering throughout the map - an element that makes its multiplayer so great - which is difficult to distill into a single player campaign while maintaining that feeling of freedom and fluidity."Game designers did experiments that we called action blocks," said MacCandlish. "Where they tried each week to do a different experiment with a different aspect of the Titanfall universe and what that could be in single player."The entire single player team was given this task. Each one, or groups of them, spent an entire week creating gameplay mechanics that would compel the player within the Titanfall universe."A lot of time they were just like an influence. We'd learn from that and then apply the ideas. In some cases they did really actually make it in, but that wasn't really the goal of it. It was to learn things from [research and development] and then apply those ideas in mission designs."One such block that did make it into the whole game was "the crane." A seemingly simple puzzle-like mechanic where the player would operate a crane that suspended wall panels in order to create a kind of gauntlet of wall-running surfaces."In a week [a member of the Titanfall 2 development team] made a test level," said McCoy. "It was all grey box but he had a little thing you would use to move the panel and then you could move the crane. And then he was like, 'Was this fun?' And it was. So it made its way into the level."This process went on and on, eventually creating between 100 and 200 action blocks, though not all made it into the game. MacClandish recalls one that was eventually scrapped."You'd be progressing on foot and then radioing back to the titan and he'd mortar positions," MacClandish said. "This was kind of coming off of [Titanfall's DLC mode] Frontier Defense where we had the mortar titans. And so the titan would kind of obliterate the area of enemies you were looking at, but it didn't quite feel connected enough. Because it was an off-screen titan helping you out."What Titanfall lacked in single player is, at least from what I saw, being made up for in its sequel. It's story of unlikely friendship, built upon the mechanics that made the first game so enjoyable. Its dialogue tree with BT-7274, even if it eventually comes to not mean more than a slight difference in responses, is fostering the kind of relationship between the dual protagonists you'd want in buddy cop film.And though BT-7274 is the most advanced titan to date - the first that wasn't repurposed from the IMC, created solely by the Militia - with the ability to mimic and replicate the abilities of the many titans you'll fight during the campaign, from what I've seen, he's more comrade than tool. It's a relationship that goes deep, and I can't wait to delve into itAnd for those wondering whether the campaign will simply be a quick primer for Titanfall 2's ostensibly multiplayer-focused gameplay, McCoy assures it will be a lengthier experience than expected."As we've been testing it, and people have been playing it, people's expectations are that it's much shorter than it actually is," McCoy said. "So it will be longer than I think people will expect."

Brandin Tyrrel is an Editor at IGN and enamored with first-person shooters. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrandinTyrrel