Titanfall 2 *might* have ruined Destiny PvP for me (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, August 22, 2016, 14:32 (3015 days ago) @ Korny

Spent a couple more hours with the Titanfall 2 Tech Test last night, and had an absolute blast. Speedracer and I teamed up and played a few amazing games together. We eventually ran into connection issues and couldn't get the game to keep us in a lobby together so we jumped back over to Destiny to play some Iron Banner.

Shame we never got to play together. Titanfall 2 suffers from the same issue that plagued TF1: It's fun in 20-minute bursts, but gets soooo boooooring afterwards. Being in a group would definitely mitigate that, although the fun doesn't change a whole lot because of the spawn system that throws "cooperation" out the window.

Not for me. I can play Titanfall for hours by myself and never get bored. Like Bungie's Halo games, the sandbox is so varied that I see something I haven't seen before in almost every single match. It also uses these "epic moments" to reward skill. The better you get at the game, the more amazing-looking stuff you can pull off. It's almost the opposite of Destiny, where playing well (or waiting long enough) is "rewarded" with a win-button super move. Titanfall rewards you by giving you the tools to do badass stuff that is difficult to pull off but feels amazing.

Wow. Destiny has never, EVER, felt so slow to me before. I don't mean in terms of the pacing. I mean I could literally feel the delay between what my fingers were doing and what I was seeing on screen. I could almost count the individual f-r-a-m-e-s as they ticked by. It felt awful. I know Titanfall 2 runs at 60fps, while Destiny runs at 30fps. I've jumped back and forth between Destiny and other 60fps games. I've always noticed the difference, but never to such a degree.
This is totally the kind of thing you adjust to over time. If I play nothing but Destiny for another month, I probably won't even remember the difference. But come October, there's no way I won't be playing a good chunk of Titanfall 2. That might push Destiny into a "PvE only" zone for me, at least for a while.

It was worse when you'd hope back over to Reach after playing Black Ops, believe me. The thing is that movement itself is much faster in Titanfall too, so it's not just a framerate thing. You get adjusted to twitch reflexes so much that you get some anxiety because of Destiny's slower movement. For ejemplo, this is me playing Destiny after a lot of Overwatch, where I quasi-Main Lucio:

Yeah I remember going from Modern Warfare 2 back to Reach and having similar feelings. I think part of my problem is that I've been playing Destiny almost exclusively for 2 years now. I'm so intimately tuned-in to how it feels and plays. What's strange to me is that jumping into Titanfall 2 felt completely natural. Going back is where I really felt the difference.

Besides the technical stuff, Titanfall 2's combat sandbox is stellar. There is a complete lack of the "I call bullshit!" moments that many of us experience so often with Destiny. I never got shot from around corners, I never saw other players teleporting or lagging all over the place, I never turned down a hallway to find myself facing 4 enemy snipers all hard-scoping on my position. Win or lose, there was zero frustration.

The problem is that there is almost no spawning system. Your spawns are seemingly random, so while you always know why you died, usually it's because the game put you into a bad situation unfairly. That said, you come to anticipate that pretty quickly, so you start to get rid of feeling comfortable. You are never in a defensible position (unless your whole team holes up in one corner of the map, which is surprisingly effective).

I almost never run into that myself (compared to the 8-10 times per match that Destiny spawns me somewhere I shouldn't be). In Titanfall, even if I spawn somewhat close to the enemy, you are so nimble and mobile as a Pilot that I never have trouble moving to an advantageous position.

Best of all, playing Titanfall can be like experiencing a non-stop highlight reel. Game after game was filled with epic moment after epic moment.

It's fast-paced and frenetic, for sure. not sure that I would immediately call that "epic". But whatever gets your jollies, man. I will say that the animation for Titans (both AI and player-controlled) is stellar, so a fight with one definitely feels like a movie.
Gunplay itself outside of them is like a much more limited Black Ops 3, but the guns themselves behave somewhat like Destiny (A higher TTK than usual for a game this fast-paced, which is actually great), so it's a weird happy medium. If only it didn't get boring so fast.

I like the stripped-down nature of the guns in Titanfall. I feel like there are enough options to fit most playstyles, but things don't get redundant or bloated the way most COD or Battlefield games feel. There is 1 weapon for each archetype, with enough unlocks to tweak it a little in each direction. Suite me great.

Also, I wonder if the enemy AI can kill you, or if they can only bring your health down to a certain degree. I've never seen them kill anyone. They tend to run into walls and look surprised more often than not, so that's not improved at all over the first game, and has me slightly worried about the campaign (though I'm sure they're more than likely deliberately stupid, and are intended solely for point-farming, just like the first game).

The AI can certainly kill you. If you're careless and let them swarm you, they can take you down. They are also a threat to Titans because your shields won't recharge while you're taking fire. So even when there is almost no risk of them blowing up your Titan, they will make you vulnerable to other more serious attacks.
And enemy Titans running on Autopilot can absolutely kill you as well. They're not as effective as most real players, but they're enough of a threat to take them seriously.

My PS4 DVR decided to stop working last night, so I unfortunately lost all the footage I tried to save. You'll have to take my word for it ;)

It's weird. Maybe it's the game engine, but Call of Duty and Titanfall both cause wonkyness with the game DVRs. You don't notice it as much on Xbone because the clips are 30 seconds, but anything longer and the DVRs freeze up and have a 50% chance of not even recording your clips.

That's why I opted to stream instead.

Could be that, but I also discovered that my hard drive was almost entirely full. Maybe a combination of the two? Either way, I'll make sure I stream everything next weekend so I can go back and pull clips.