Even while most of us were wowed by Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment’s upcoming multiplayer-only shooter, there was still a small part of us that wished we could play it offline. For that matter, it would have been great to have a single-player campaign to go with it. The lack of a typical single-player, highlighted in various “movie-like” trailers, has made marketing the game fairly tough according to producer Drew McCoy.
Speaking on NeoGAF, McCoy stated that, “Its actually been really tough trying to accurately market Titanfall. If you look at what we’ve done, its a lot different than what most FPS games do. Without a bunch of highly scripted SP moments to recam from different angles, the usual ‘movie like’ trailer is just about right out.
“Instead, we’ve decided to show unedited gameplay segments that last 3-5 minutes (so far – more footage coming, of course!) to show the “flow” of the game. Starting as a Pilot, taking on AI and other player Pilots, wall running around a Titan, earning your Titan, climbing in, battling other Titans while stomping on humans, ejecting, etc. There’s a huge amount of gameplay mechanics available at any one time, and encompassing them in a few minutes is actually quite hard to do.
“Its also why we took an extremely early pre-alpha build of the game to events like Gamescom, PAX, etc. to let normal dudes hands-on time with the game. There’s no amount of polished marketing that can replace playing the actual game.”
McCoy also talked about the recent controversial decision to limit Titanfall’s multiplayer cap to 12 players. “What about high player counts makes that more fun, though? I honestly want to know, because this kind of stuff is super important and we obsess over it every day.” Considering that games with 64 players like Battlefield 4 are struggling to even work properly, it’s a fair question.
Titanfall releases on March 11th in North America and March 14th in the UK for Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC.