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Titanfall Beta (PC/Xbone) Impressions (No Key Begging/Trading or I will ban you!)

theRizzle said:
I really don't understand all the complains of "The A.I. sucks" that I've been reading. Obviously they are made to be stupid. As far as I can tell, what you've described here is EXACTLY how Respawn meant for the game to be played, and I think it works well within that framework. I can't even imagine the hate this game would get if there were even semi-competent bots running around slaughtering people.
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Oh certainly, I can see the deliberate design mechanisms everywhere. What I think though is that it's boring design. My preference would be to remove them, up the regular player count to 8 v 8 (so up to 32 if you count 16 players + 16 titan A.I.), and then have pilot kills cost ever so slightly more titanfall timer reduction points. This way you're always facing actual combatants, and you're not just feeling completely glazed over by the repetitive and garbage gameplay nature of the essentially do-nothing A.I.

I mean the problem seems to me just that it isn't very fun as a mechanic. Every time I kill a bot in the game, it just feels like I've wasted a second doing something inherently stupid. Might as well be kicking the side of a street sign for all it matters from a skill perspective. I do not enjoy gameplay where I have to contribute absolutely nothing of my acquired skill sets to accomplish.
 
Amir0x said:
Oh certainly, I can see the deliberate design mechanisms everywhere. What I think though is that it's boring design. My preference would be to remove them, up the regular player count to 8 v 8 (so up to 32 if you count 16 players + 16 titan A.I.), and then have pilot kills cost ever so slightly more titanfall timer reduction points. This way you're always facing actual combatants, and you're not just feeling completely glazed over by the repetitive and garbage gameplay nature of the essentially do-nothing A.I.

I mean the problem seems to me just that it isn't very fun as a mechanic. Every time I kill a bot in the game, it just feels like I've wasted a second doing something inherently stupid. Might as well be kicking the side of a street sign for all it matters from a skill perspective. I do not enjoy gameplay where I have to contribute absolutely nothing of my acquired skill sets to accomplish.
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This is how I feel. I don't think I got killed by a bot more than a couple times in all the games I played. May as well be shooting a random marker around the map to get points for the titans. Why not make them a bit harder and count it as half a real kill or something?
 
Asked for a PC code on EA chat, they provided it. Swell chaps.

Played for about two hours and while it's definitely not merely COD with mechs, the description's not all that far from the mark either.

I mean, it's basically the entire COD infantry dynamic fused with the infantry vs armor dynamic of the Battlefield series, with the infantry vs armor dynamic being facilitated by the situational parkour abilities (which allows you to actually survive the cat-and-mouse game with Titans).

It's fun and all, but I don't think it's $60 fun and as to whether it's $560 worth of fun, well, heh...
 
I think this is a really fun game. The speed of the game is something I'm not used to, mainly playing Battlefield 4 as my go to fps. I think that killing grunts is pretty cool since you are almost always shooting at something. But sometimes I might refrain from shooting them if I see a pilot near me so I won't pop up on the minimap. I know you can unlock a suppressor for the EVA-8 eventually so that won't be a concern later on.

The grunts fighting each other in close quarter is pretty neat and when I saved my own grunt they would thank me which I thought was just adorable. It made me want to give a thumbs up to the grunt I just saved and say no problem.

An annoyance I do have though, is that fighting against a Titan as a pilot can be a monumental task to take on without the help of others. This is something I find annoying in Battlefield 4 as well since I hate using or fighting against vehicles in that game as well. I almost always go infantry. I'm assuming you should employ a more hit and run tactics for pilots vs Titans or just try to rodeo them. Fighting Titan vs Titan feels great though. Also as others have mentioned the 1 minute lobby waiting for the next game might be a little excessive of a wait.
 
Papercuts said:
Bots seem to go for titans a lot. Specter's can fuck you up with rockets, it's actually pretty good to hack them.

But yeah, I'm not surprised to see such a mixed reaction to the bots here. Though it all seems clearly intended as they even have a bunch of pretty funny lines in awe of how amazing the pilots are.
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spectres are a bit annoying when you dont see them, they take out a good quarter of a health slug when your shields down in one shot.
 
Amir0x said:
I mean the problem seems to me just that it isn't very fun as a mechanic. Every time I kill a bot in the game, it just feels like I've wasted a second doing something inherently stupid. Might as well be kicking the side of a street sign for all it matters from a skill perspective. I do not enjoy gameplay where I have to contribute absolutely nothing of my acquired skill sets to accomplish.
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Totally agree with this. More often than not I came across a squad of 3 or 4 bots and I could wipe them all out just by holding LMB and emptying my clip at them. It's completely unsatisfying.

Which - if you are comparing the grunts to MOBA creeps as I have seen fairly often - is not a horrible thing as it serves a larger purpose beyond just eliminating your target from the battlefield as you would a human player, (Attrition Points) but I think it's something most FPS players are not accustomed to. Unless they played Monday Night Combat.

And they probably didn't.
 
I downloaded, and played this game over my phone's 4G connection.

The graphics were great, the gameplay was sharp, and the lag was glorious! Will await attempt to connect to servers for another 5 minutes tomorrow.
 
So I got the PC beta and I think it's pretty fun and fast-paced but there are 2 major problems I have with this game:

-The bots. They are more of a distraction and annoyance, they should be removed.

-The smart pistol. What the fuck were they thinking?

The Titans are pretty great, I also would just sneak up behind enemy titans and ride them to kill them rather than take them head-on (which is pretty stupid to do as a pilot), their teammates don't give enough support to kill me off their backs.
 
malfcn said:
How does the radar system work? Sometimes I have people not showing up on the HUD.
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firing unsuppressed guns or a bot spotting you shows your position. big circles are humans, dots are bots, triangle thingys are titans. arrow below circles means the guy is below you, above means he is above you.
 
Got a couple of rounds in with the beta on PC.

I'm a big fan of the player movement and the being able to hip fire with pretty decent accuracy. I hate having to use iron sights all the time in shooters (personal pet peeve) Also the game has a great pacing and is very accessible through the menus and while in the game. I was wall jumping in the tutorial like a boss after a couple minutes and everything felt natural...Really liked what they've done there. Bots are dumb and easy to kill but I paid them no mind when playing.

My two main issues/problems:

- The screen clutter. I swear there were 10 different arrows and notifications on screen at one point. Its jarring when everything else is going on, like...A big ass Titan shooting at you!

- The lack of destruction. This is a big one with me and I made this point when beta footage was shown about a month ago. How...How can you have a mech game like this and nothing blows up...Not a wall, not a railing, nothing! This takes away a lot of the wow factor with me and will undoubtedly leave the game stale if I were to buy this in the long run. Yea, I've been spoiled by BF4 in this instance but you have this massive battle going on and your mechs can only kill people and dirt.

At the moment it's no buy for me, due to my last point. Its a decision I can't truly understand from their dev team and even after playing a few rounds I was turned off by the whole thing. I eagerly await to see them implement this in future TitanFall titles.
 
Just finished playing 5 games of Attrition on XB1. Initial verdict, not my thing. Combat feels run of the mill shooter, with not much of weapon feel or impactful weapon sounds. I just never feel like I'm doing any damage to anything, especially as a Pilot fighting Titans'.

Initial feels are disappointing :( I'll keep with it, see if it grows on me. Hope to get PC beta as well, as I have a feeling I'd feel more at home there...
 
I don't like the bots much. Sure they 'fill out' the match but they just add too much clutter. It's not easy enough to differentiate players from the bots, whenever I shoot them I realize I should have been aiming at the other 'bot' to my right because it was actually a pilot.

In the end I only kill them for the unlocks, shooting them just reveals my position to other players, distracts me and they pose no actual threat to me due to their bad aiming. They may as well not be there.
 
I'm having this weird screechy sound ingame anytime actions are performed. Anyone have any idea what it might be/how to fix it?
 
Played it for about half an hour, really enjoyed myself. Haven't got accustomed to all the mechanics yet, nor did I do too well in any of my matches, but I had fun. A whole lot of it in-fact, which is quite frankly all I care about. Game is ridiculously frantic, always something going on. Also Last Titan Standing is awesome.
 
Just played a few round Last Titan Standing. Also a very fun mode i am enjoying this game a lot, love the netcode and my ping is super low around 23ms on EU West.
 
Played the PC beta, maybe get the game later
Why is there no mode that allows anyone on your squad use the Titan?

You can only gift it if nobody has piloted it.
 
(PC Version. Maxed out)

The Good:
- Movement in the game is ace. No doubt about that, despite sometimes when trying to jump into a 2nd story window instead of climbing to the roof can be an exercise in frustration in some situations.
- Audio is great. Especially the banter of the AI.
- Hit detection was surprisingly good.

The Bad:
- Visuals are really lacking in this game. Are assets being raised for launch?
- Maps are really-really limited in scope thus far, despite transversal capabilities.
- Titans feel really weak when facing one another. A pilot will obliterate one faster than another Titan, even with damage core up and bursting with rockets.
- Lobby times between games is atrocious.
- Recoil, or the absolute lack thereof. Hold LMB to win. It looked this way in the vids, and after hands on, I can't fathom how they thought this recoil tuning was good.
- Yuck at the tutorial in this, both time it takes to do, and the fashion of how it's done.

The Fugly:
- AI. Sometimes it'll actually focus fire you. Other times it'll just run right past you as you guns blazing wipe out their buddies. They're far too hard to spot differences between them and pilots, key identifier being only their movements.

They could have reduced the AI and get more players in a game, but the maps so far feel cluttered as is with a few Titans out at once. Not to mention the choke points. Biggest issues are AI, then a tie with map design and visuals for me.

As of now, can't justify the asking price of this game, and have severe concerns about the longevity of play in this. $40 should be the target price.
 
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I guess I'm not allowed to play it because of my laptop's video card (ati mobility radeon 5650), or something. Even though the graphics card is switched to the right one. After the splash screens, just get a black screen. Is there a fix for this? Windowed?

Even though my laptop can play many high end graphics games (Witcher 2, Crysis, Metro Last Light). Since I'm not getting a One any time soon, and can't play this on my laptop (unless if there's a fix), it's an easy decision not to bother with this game at all. Oh well.
 
Played about 5 or 6 matches tonight. Pretty fun, but I had a lot of issues with the game chugging or some sort of latency over the connection. It said my ping was 23ms to the South Central server, so I don't know.

I'll echo that I don't understand the point of the bots. Just a worthless distraction that seems to be put there to allow any random person to get some sort of kill even while getting decimated. Really has that "flavor of the month" vide for me. Fun, but nothing I can see myself playing for months on end.
 
Amir0x said:
Oh certainly, I can see the deliberate design mechanisms everywhere. What I think though is that it's boring design. My preference would be to remove them, up the regular player count to 8 v 8 (so up to 32 if you count 16 players + 16 titan A.I.), and then have pilot kills cost ever so slightly more titanfall timer reduction points. This way you're always facing actual combatants, and you're not just feeling completely glazed over by the repetitive and garbage gameplay nature of the essentially do-nothing A.I.

I mean the problem seems to me just that it isn't very fun as a mechanic. Every time I kill a bot in the game, it just feels like I've wasted a second doing something inherently stupid. Might as well be kicking the side of a street sign for all it matters from a skill perspective. I do not enjoy gameplay where I have to contribute absolutely nothing of my acquired skill sets to accomplish.
Click to expand...
Mostly agreed.

I haven't been following the development of this much, so I went into the beta blind. Didn't know about the bots beforehand and am sort of confused by their presence.

I may still pick it up since I am having fun and it looks nice, but I dunno. The bot thing is weird.
 
I think I'm the only one who is shit with the Smart Pistol. I'm fine with most of the other weapons, but when I try to play with the Smart Pistol I have my worst rounds. I guess it just doesn't fit my play style.
 
Just enjoying Hardpoint Domination a lot. I like just hanging back, playing defensively. Also, a lot more battles with Pilots because you can tell who is coming to try to capture!
 
dreamfall said:
Just enjoying Hardpoint Domination a lot. I like just hanging back, playing defensively. Also, a lot more battles with Pilots because you can tell who is coming to try to capture!
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Hardpoint on Fracture is my shit. I haven't lost that mode on that map yet and I've been MVP every time. lol
 
EA support gave me a PC key. Very nice of them.

I played a few rounds, and it's a damn fun game. I'm not particularly good at it most of the time, though. I feel like I'm missing something fundamental when I use a Titan. Perhaps I'm just impatient and want to punch people too much, but I tend to get messed up bad no matter how I fight.

Movement is fantastic. I love every time I get to wallrun and move quickly around the map. And I think the bots work well. They let players live longer while still doing things, they flush out people who don't shoot, and even if they're just bots, the kinesthetics of gunning down three dudes is always at least a little bit satisfying.

I don't think it's the sort of game I'd play for months, but it's a very strong design.

I think the game crashes my ATI 6470M drivers every now and then, though. PC gaming on a laptop can really suck sometimes. I had to hard reboot once.
 
I'm sold. Intuitive gameplay, lots of scope for strategy. I wish they did away with ADS and left it as oldschool fps aiming to keep the tempo of the gameplay up.

One thing you can definitely see is that there's lots of scope for growth in how the game plays. I mean, my 3rd game? Get into a fight with 2 titans, get one down to minimum health whilst my own titan is disabling. Eject, lock on with anti-titan weapon as i fly up, hit him, then land on the fucker and finish him off in rodeo. I mean what the fuck. I didn't even have to think about it. It just flowed.

thank fuck hipfire is a decent option here. I hate ADS with a passion.
 
I was having lag and server disconnect problems so I switched over to ethernet instead of wireless. It only moderately helped.

I am able to finish about 1 in 4 matches. The rest of the time the game crashes or boots me back to the title screen after about a minute of playtime.

I am having a lot of fun when I can actually play the game, but unless the frequent timeouts and disconnects get better, there's no way I would ever pay $60 for it.

Maybe Comcast is just having a bad night or something, but I've never experienced such awful problems with any retail game.
 
I gotta say, even with all of the hype, the first time I dropped my titan it was almost a magical feeling. This game is fun through and through. It is very accessible for an average player like me and I feel like I can remain competitive with some of th he more advanced players.
I also really like the idea of the burn cards and mods. I got prosthetic legs and flew around the screen. It has a lot of variety.
Look, I dont pretend to be a hardcore fps guy, but I really like this game. I can see where some hardcore guys get upset with some of the bots and A.I. but for me it has made me want to play a fps game. Which is the first time since MW2.
 
The fact that I need to farm 100 bots for a new sight sucks, it's just not fun running around shooting them.

Also whenever I get a Titan I just let the ai control it. The game is way more fun on foot. The perfect game mode would be search and destroy with no titans and no bots, at least four me.
 
Gets a meh from me. BF4 is a better vehicle game. COD is a better infantry game. They stole a lot from Section 8 which had more variety in the vehicles you can call in. It's not for me.
 
After playing this a bit more on PC, I'm now for sure going to have to get this on two platforms. Here's hoping for a good sale soon after release.

Mouse and keyboard is just fantastic with the mobility of this game.
 
I wouldn't mind the bots as much if they were visually differentiated from pilots more. Too many situations where you shoot a bot thinking he's a pilot and give your position away.
 
Game is very fun. The movement... I love scaling shit in this game. Can't wait to try out the other Titans and see more maps.
 
Dammit man, it keeps stuttering. I can play Far cry 3 without a problem on low/medium, but i can't seem to play Titanfall on low with out it stuttering every time i am in action. Damnit man!!
 
RotBot said:
I wouldn't mind the bots as much if they were visually differentiated from pilots more. Too many situations where you shoot a bot thinking he's a pilot and give your position away.
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Yeah, I shoot whatever I see & they are often bots.

The game plays well and is a lot of fun. People are developing good techniques with the titans, I've noticed. The wall-running is a cool game idea and, when used properly, gives the player a great way to dodge attacks.

I think with a good group of friends, Titanfall will be a blast.
 
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