This post contains spoilers about Titanfall 2's single-player campaign.
One of the most-discussed elements of the first Titanfall was its lack of a single-player campaign. The sequel, due out next month, has a campaign mode, and we learned even more about it today.
Writing on the game's website, director Steve Fukuda explained that Respawn planned a single-player campaign for Titanfall 2 from the beginning of development. He said the team prototyped a "typical shooter" with gameplay mechanics from the first title, but this "wasn't fun at all."
To find what it was looking for, Respawn challenged its designers to come up with a compelling gameplay concept themed around the relationship between a Pilot and their Titan.
"Each week they would regroup to show and play what they made to the team," Fukuda said. "They did this for months and created over 100 action blocks (a prototype) that expressed many different ideas around traversal, puzzle solving, combat, and more. From there we narrowed down the best ideas and refined them into the single-player missions you will be playing this October. It was incredibly hard but a welcome challenge."
Titanfall 2's story focuses on the human character Jack Cooper and the Titan BT-7274. This Titan is a new breed in the Titanfall universe; he's the first made by the resistance group called the Frontier Militia. The others were created by the nefarious IMC group.
BT, as he's referred to, is very smart. He can learn and respond to what's in front of him and can make use of any Titan loadout. According to Fukuda, he "embodies the Militia's culture of teamwork, craftsmanship, and looking out for each other."
As for Cooper, he's a low-level rifleman for the militia whose ambition is to become a Pilot. Captain Tai Lastimosa sees Cooper's potential and acts as his mentor at the start of the game. One key point in the story is a mission to the enemy planet Typhon that goes badly, and Lastimosa ends up being killed. Cooper and BT must then work together to complete the mission.
The rest of the Titanfall 2 story sees players exploring Typhon to learn the intentions of the IMC.
"The more they (Cooper and BT) work together, the stronger the link between Pilot and Titan becomes. We drew lots of inspiration from buddy cop movies and other genres that explored the relationship between man and machine such as Terminator 2, and even earlier works like The Black Stallion," Fukuda said. "In the end we are very proud of the story and relationship that we're telling in Titanfall 2 and feel that as players get to know BT through the game they will develop their own bond with him as well. We know we did."
GameSpot recently played a portion of Titanfall 2's campaign, in which editor Scott Butterworth mentions the game features traces of Halo, Firewatch, and Mirror's Edge. You can read the full preview here.
Titanfall 2 launches on October 28 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. A new cinematic trailer for the game's campaign has been released and can be seen above.