PlayStation LifeStyle: The tech test has seen some mixed reactions, with a lot of online communities saying good and bad things about it. What’s your take on this, in general? Is there anything that jumped out at you? Any users that surprised you or made particularly good points?”
Joel Emslie: Absolutely. We have a history of listening to feedback and can make a better game based on that feedback. I would say the part I found surprising…um, when I was a little caught off guard was some of the feedback was coming from a place of… it’s as if we would never make a change or listen to anybody.
We want to hear this stuff, but I was surprised by the preconception that we wouldn’t listen to them. So I felt that I wanted to say ‘No, no, we’re listening.’ We’re all ears. We listen to everything; we read everything. One of the things I was most proud of — for the team — was that we were able to pivot in one week and make changes to the game. We were able to change it within one week.
And they’re good changes and it’s good feedback and we wanna hear that stuff but… the main message I would want to be loud and clear to the community of gamers and press is that we’re all ears. We are listening. We want to make a better game. We want to hear the most negative feedback possible so that we can react and get that in there and calibrate it.”
PSLS: Can you clarify specifically what was that change was — the quick one that you made in a week?
Emslie: It’s not just one thing in particular. When you look at Titanfall 1, the game was cranked up to 11. You know, we cranked it up to 11 and ripped off the knob and tossed it. So Titanfall 2 is taking that game and refining it and balancing it getting things to feel right and elements and weapons and abilities to have meaning and counters and all that good stuff.
And so I believe that ah… the first game was so vanilla. A lot of stuff was there, but it was so experimental that it just, it didn’t have a lot of meaning to it. I think the reaction from the community was, looking at the game from the way it was balanced and stuff and have some ideas about ah…they would like to have brought bring back this element or that element and ‘that worked really well.’
But yeah. It wasn’t just one thing. It was a range of different things. And I think you can look at the tech test and they were only being vocal about a few things, which is amazing considering how different a game it actually is.
Welch: So, the purpose of a tech test was to — well in advance of launch — understand if there were possible impediments or roadblocks for our server infrastructure. That’s what it was and that’s why we didn’t call it a beta, didn’t call it a demo. It wasn’t for those purposes. We didn’t market this thing or say, ‘hey a million people have come and signed up for whatever.’ It’s nice to have, and we did listen to the feedback, but very successful tech test. Both weekends we were identifying issues that would have been stumbling blocks at launch.
On Wallrunning, there was some feedback like, ‘Okay so in Titanfall 2, these two maps you’re showing us don’t feature a lot of wall-running.’ Well, it was a tech test and we didn’t want to show all these brand new maps we have, which are really high in wall-running and chaining wall runs together
“[The notion of gameplay feedback coming from a test intended to evaluate online servers] is good and bad, I mean it was surprising to see how it came at us, but….”
Emslie: “It’s nice to see how passionate people are.”
Welch: We make these games because we’re passionate about them and we make them for the fans. We do wanna hear (that stuff).
Emslie: And Day 1, launch, the game will be a certain way based on our feedback from the tech test and our experience with Titanfall development — both games — the whole launch experience, and post launch, it’ll continue. We’ll continue to get feedback, we’ll continue to listen to people. We’ll update the game, calibrate this or move that. It’s really important to just keep that dialog going so that the game gets completely refined.
PSLS: Speaking of customization, will Titan and/or pilot skins be part of paid microtransactions? Or free? Unlockable? What’s that looking like?”
Emslie: Day 1, we have a massive amount of camos and we actually call them ‘war paint.’ There’s war paints for very specific… not just camo, but different like, chromed-out stuff and different stylings of decals and stuff like that. We also have nose art which goes over the front of the Titan, which in most cases is custom to each type of Titan. Pilot… Pilot weapons, you can throw camo on. Titan weapons, you can throw camo on. There could be, based on where we go with DLC, there may be a point where we charge for cosmetics, but we’re not there yet.
Certainly, our focus has been day 1, in the box, cramming as much as we can possibly get in there so that people are really feeling like they got the value of their money — like they got their money’s worth.
PSLS: How did the original Titanfall’s sales compare to your own expectations? I have seven million written here. Is that accurate?
Welch: EA released at some point, 7.5 million. I think we’re at almost 11 million unique players. For a single platform early on in the hardware cycle, that’s extraordinary. What I’ve heard from EA is that it’s their best-selling new IP ever. So I think back to my early days with all of the Call of Duty games, you know, Titanfall 1…well ahead of the sales curve of Call of Duty. The attach rate was much higher.
For us, we weren’t expecting this high level of sales at all. I think if we’d been multiplatform, that’d have been extraordinary at launch.
PSLS: Has Respawn ever considered making the grappling hook a default ability for every class?
Emslie: I think people love (the grappling hook), but there are abilities in multiplayer that, in my opinion, once you get to know them, rival the grappling hook. It also depends on what type of map you’re playing on. Is the grappling hook, like, an appropriate tactical ability there? So I think that the way the pilot abilities are strung together, and the way they reflect the way the Titan abilities are done…. There’s a gameplay language There’s a gameplay balance to how all this stuff works together. Like imagine if all the pieces of a chess set were queens and could do anything.
PSLS: Right.
Emslie: You start losing the value of gameplay. There’s a counter balance to everything. There’s a way that these things plug into the mutliplayer experience. Tech test only showed a few abilities. There’s a lot more to it than that. There’s a lot more… uh, there’s the entire game. There’s a lot more weapons than we showed and customization within the weapons. We scratched the surface, we released a sample of content. I believe there are stronger things in the final content that maybe people will realize, ‘Oh, this fits here, but it might not fit over there. There’s something cooler that fits over there.
Welch: Coming out of the tech test, when you read the data for what people are doing with your tech test, which is awesome to do, grapple was number one and then stim was number two. But then, once you experience different maps and different play styles, grapple probably won’t be your default. Let’s put it that way.
