Titanfall (March 11th/14th) (360/Xbox One/PC)

[Sigma]

It's ruined all other shooters for me! lol.

[Neuro]

in general or for multiplayer?

[Sigma]

In general I guess. Once I could do some of the parkour stuff in Titanfall, all shooters where you just walk/run along on the ground no longer felt the same. Maybe I'll get into the new COD, as the devs of that seem to have been heavily inspired by Titanfall.

[Neuro]

you should try the new wolfenstein if you havent yet, its excellent , no multiplayer though , tons of replay value in my opinion and the shooting is butter smooth

[ThaJim2]

I am with Sigma on this. Played a bit of BF4 and it is just so slow and you cant fun on walls and do double jumps.

[Sigma]

you should try the new wolfenstein if you havent yet, its excellent , no multiplayer though , tons of replay value in my opinion and the shooting is butter smooth

Aye, I've got that game on PC. I dunno whether I was having issues with input lag, but the controls didn't seem very responsive. I played it for a bit and haven't gone back to it since the day it came out. I'll give it another go.

One thing I hate about Titanfall is people who don't play as part of a team. I just played a game of capture the flag where we were 2-0 up with only a couple of minutes to go. Rather than everyone defending our flag, the other 5 members of my team were all going for glory trying to capture their flag again, leaving me sitting there being the sole flag defender. The other team had a couple of titans at their flag spot and they were just slaughtering our team members and they managed to get a tie at 2-2 about 2 seconds before the time was up.

[ThaJim2]

Is there a way to better aim your titan when it drops to land on the baddies? Besides needing to play for the rest of my life to get to 100 wins (like 17-3 my last 20 games and still feels like I have forever to go) I need like 30 more of the drop kills.

[Sigma]

Are you using Warpfall Transmitter? That makes it easier.

Try dropping it on one of those drop-pod things that grunts come out of. If you time it right, you can get them as they come out and get several kills in one go. Also, if you go up to a group of grunts and run around next to them, they'll usually stand there like chumps firing their guns at you and won't move out of the way of the drop.

The other way is to rodeo an auto-titan and then look straight down at the ground and call in your titan. It'll drop straight on to the auto-titan and kill it.

[Neuro]

[Sigma]

Haha, that's pretty cool!

Since update 6 came out for this game I've not been enjoying it as much because of technical issues. The UI freezes for a few seconds at the beginning and end of a round, so you can't navigate through the menus to select your loadout/burn cards. Also, I'm getting disconnected from the server quite frequently, sometimes immediately after a game has ended and sometimes as the countdown is progressing in a lobby. None of this ever happened to me before update 6. It makes playing the game quite frustrating.

Hopefully they can smooth these issues out, because I think when they release the next DLC pack, there may be one more update and then that's it - they'll move on to other things.

[ThaJim2]

^Its been a while since I was really playing but I have noticed those issues too in the last week. Was killing it until yesterday where I just sucked. Thanks for the drop advice as that was about the only thing I did well yesterday got about 6 or 7.

Liked that video too.

[Sigma]

FrothyOmen is so fucking good at this game: -

[Sigma]

Jim, here's something I didn't know until today: -

If you use arc mines, when you call in your titan you can throw 2 of them on your titan's back before you get in it. If an enemy pilot tries to rodeo you - boom, they're dead. That does also cause your titan to lose its shields, although if you're playing with a friend and they throw the arc mines on your titan's back, you take no damage whatsoever if someone rodeos you.

[ThaJim2]

Did no know that either. I use the xray vision thingy so when ever I go into my titan I hit it really fast so I get to use that for a bit. Not sure if any of the other skills are applicable or work.

[Sigma]

The final map pack for this is out tomorrow. Hopefully they fix the server issues at the same time.

I wish developers didn't charge for map packs, not because I object to paying developers for their work, but because it splits up the community. If every player in the game had access to all of the maps, it would be much better. In my experience, on the European servers people either gravitate towards the original maps or whatever is the very latest map pack. It would be nice to see the DLC maps in heavier rotation in the standard playlists, but obviously you don't see that much as it requires all 12 players in any given lobby to have the map packs installed.

[Sigma]

The new map pack is out now. 621 MB.

EDIT - It turns out that that was just an update to the game, not the map pack. The map pack is out (it's 1.8 GB), except it says that you have to pay for it even if you have the season pass. Supposedly, Microsoft are working on fixing it.

[Sigma]

I just had a sweet game on the new maps. One of those games where nearly everything goes right. I should have recorded more clips, but here's a couple stitched together: -

[Sigma]

The new update for this has just been announced and it's huge!

It adds 3 new game modes, including a co-op horde mode. I watched the Respawn devs playing it on Twitter and it looks fucking awesome. They're also adding a variation on Marked for Death called Marked for Death Pro and a mode called Deadly Ground where the levels fill up with electric fog, forcing you to wall run and get to higher ground. The latter mode will work with existing game modes.

There's a whole bunch of changes. The patch notes are here: -

http://www.titanfall.com/game-update-eight" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It goes live tomorrow on Xbox One and PC.

[ThaJim2]

I will play this weekend for sure. Not saying but if any of the Level 10 pilots out there would like to give this poor still on Level 8 for months now pilot a beta invite that would be rad.

Honestly I don't understand the hate this game has received. They have done an awesome job of adding stuff. I feel its the biggest leap in FPS gameplay since probably CoDMW. The only thing that sucks is level 8 of being a pilot.

[Sigma]

I just had a go at the new Frontier Defense co-op mode.

You have to play 3 games before you're allowed to set up your own custom games, so I tried a quick match. I was matched up with a gen 1, gen 3 and gen 5 pilot. Basically, you have to defend a big transmitter thing that's at one end of the map. There are a bunch of new enemy types, including suicide spectres that rush you or the transmitter and blow themselves up, and nuke titans that try and get near your transmitter and then nuclear eject. There are also mortar titans that can fire mortars at your transmitter from the other side of the map, so it forces the team to split up. You still get to call your titan in as in the regular game modes.

The mode is played through 4 waves of increasing difficulty. After you complete a wave, you get a turret that you can place anywhere on the map, which you do by pressing up on the D-pad, then pressing the right trigger to lay the turret down, so it's a mix of FPS and tower defence. There's also ammo crates lying about and if you go up to one of those, you can change your load-out.

If your transmitter is blown up, you get to use a continue. I believe you have 3 continues before it's game over, although we completed all 4 waves after having used only 1 continue. When you complete all 4 waves, you're given a score breakdown based on the enemy types you killed, plus your team gets a star rating out of 3 stars based on performance. We scored 2 stars.

It's definitely fun, but I think the fact it's limited to 4 waves might mean it gets old quite quickly, particularly as it's not that hard. When you play zombies in COD, for example, it just keeps going and getting harder and harder, so it's about trying to get further than you've done in the past and working out strategies to get past levels when the difficulty starts to ramp up. With this, it's just 4 waves and then it's done, plus it's not all that hard to begin with. Maybe there are difficulty settings that I've not seen or something.

They've added a bunch of other stuff too. When you look at any game mode in the playlist, it tells you how many people are playing it on your server and also worldwide. There were over 800 people playing Frontier Defense just on my server, which is quite a lot considering the update has literally just come out. The new ranked mode seems cool too, although I'm yet to figure out exactly what I'm supposed to be doing with that. I played a game of regular Last Titan Standing and it came up "Rank Chip Enabled" at the start, but outside of that I'm not sure what it's about really. There's a bunch of titan voices in the Black Market that you can buy, including ones in different languages if you want to go for a Japanese one or whatever. There's also a "skip challenge" burn card that you can buy for 100,000 credits if you're stuck on a particular generation challenge and want to skip it - personally, I don't think they should have added that, but I guess some people just can't do some of the challenges and need to use it.

All in all, it seems like a really solid update. It's only 911MB too. I was expecting it to be a couple of gig.

Oh, and I can invite you to the beta of the ranked mode, but only if you're in the same lobby as me in a game - you can't just invite friends from your friends list, even when they're not playing the game.

[ThaJim2]

I have been playing Tower defense all afternoon and its awesome. Some are kind of easy and then some are impossible. Have done pirates cove and training ground probably a dozen times between them and yet to finish it. I think basically if there is a good open ground for the mortar guys and a lot of them its freaking hard. Its also nice because I am zooming though the crush with titan thing. I am not sure if its brand new or not but you can buy your way out of a leveling up thingy so I am going to do that with wins instead of grinding another 50.

[Sigma]

There's an achievement you can't get if you use that cheat burn card, although it's worth 0 gamerscore.

I'm loving this update. The horde mode aside, the matchmaking/lobby stuff is smoother than it's ever been and using a rank chip just makes me want to win even more so I can rank up, haha. Even though it's largely meaningless, going up levels and generations was addictive and the ranking system has brought that back.

[ThaJim2]

^Yeah I was debating after seeing that achievement but then I was like I have been on level 8 for 3 or 4 months and its just grinding at this point.

It also seems like they added a bunch of achievements with yesterdays update. I got 3 while the update finished updating.

[Sigma]

Yeah, I had a few pop as soon as I launched the game after updating.

I take back what I said about the horde mode being too easy! I thought it would be the same each time, in terms of the waves of enemies that they send at you, but it's not. The difficulty ramps up depending on the skill of the players on the team. I haven't won a game of this since I made that earlier post, haha.

[ThaJim2]

I got your invite but the game crashed on me and weirdly too it took out my last 4 on the homescreen too. Finally lev 9. I think I have won about 4 or 5 hordes at about a 1 in 5 or so ratio. You pretty much have to have at least one other person with headset. Training ground is impossible as you have to have all 4 big guns set up but if you have to reset the last level you will never get them set up in time and there are just too many nuke titans coming at once.

[Sigma]

No worries man. I didn't stay on much longer after I sent you that invite. If you're about this weekend, we'll have a game or two though. I'll invite you into the ranked mode beta.

[ThaJim2]

My cheap ass finally bought the season pass since its on sale.

[Sigma]

Cool. I'm glad that's on sale, cos the more players with all the maps, the better.

I hope they make them free further down the line. It would be nice if they got rid of the DLC-specific playlists, so you just had game mode playlists and there was an equal chance of any map coming up.

[Sigma]

Are you still playing this, Jim? I've been trying to figure out how to do this: -



Not that exact flag capture, but being able to jet across the map when you either eject or are standing on a titan when they eject. I can't seem to get it to work at all.

[ThaJim2]

Have not had much time lately to play and when I do get time I been playing GTA with a buddy. I hope to have more time coming up unless I go on holiday.

I know I have jumped far with an ejecting/exploding titan but I am not sure its ever been that far. I do now have all the maps.