The Press Box - Ep. 201: 'Battlefield 1,' 'Titanfall 2,' and the FPS Evolution

Episode Date: October 28, 2016

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion introduce Channel 33's new gaming podcast and discuss their impressions of newly released big-budget shooters ‘Battlefield 1’ and ‘Titanfall 2.’ Then they bring on Vince Zampella, the creator of ‘Call of Duty’ and CEO of ‘Titanfall’ developer Respawn Entertainment, to discuss his design choices and the past, present, and future of first-person shooters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

and welcome to the inaugural episode of Achievement-oriented Channel 33's gaming podcast. My name is Ben Lindberg and I'm a staff writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, able to hear me but not see me, which means that like every enemy I've encountered in Titanfall 2, he does not have a visual is my ringer colleague, Jason Concepcion. Jason, we've arrived. It's so good to be here. It's really good to be here.

The last time we talked on a podcast back in August, We did a one-off episode on No Man Sky, and we talked to the game's creator, Sean Murray, who basically hasn't been heard from since. He's in a bunker somewhere. I think we drove him into seclusion. But you and I are going to be heard from much more often. We're no longer nomads roaming the SoundCloud streets. Now we have a home. I'm knocking on wood here.

Yeah, assuming we don't screw it up, we will be in your Channel 33 feed once a week talking about what we're playing. and hardware news and new releases and larger issues facing the industry. And sometimes it'll just be the two of us. Sometimes we'll talk to fellow ringer writers. Other times we'll bring on smart people from outside the site who make games or think about games. So we're going to do a little bit of everything. It'll be the battlefield one of podcasts. Oh, that's very exciting.

Yeah. So you and I have had a busy week in our non-virtual lives. The World Series started for me and the NBA season started for you. but we still made time for video games. It was hard, but we did it. Yeah, and we met up at Madison Square Garden for the League of Legends semifinals last weekend, and we also met up in the scenic Venetian Alps circa 1918, where just an hour or so ago we flew straight into a hillside in the same plane together.

It was wonderful. Those biplanes really don't handle the way you think they will. No. Yeah, we'll get into that in a minute. So the podcast is starting at a fortuitous time because we're right in the thick of holiday release season. So on future episodes, we will get to lower profile releases and indie games, and it won't be AAA titles forever. But today, it's the big guns. Yeah, it's AAA season.

Yeah. There just seems like every game in which you can shoot somebody with a sniper rifle is coming out in the next few weeks. I know. I wonder what the strategy is there. You'd think they'd want to stagger every. huge shooter in the release dates, but I guess it's just the strongest survives and you put them all out at the same time. Yeah, I think you're just, you're kind of priming the pump for holiday season. Mm-hmm.

So later in this episode, we will be talking to Vince Ampella, who is the CEO of Titanfall 2 developer respawn, as well as the creator of Call of Duty. So we'll talk to him about Titanfall, and we'll also ask him about his history and get into the state of the first-person shooter genre. But first, we're going to talk about Battlefield 1 and we're going to talk about Titanfall 2. These are not particularly spoilable games. And I don't think we'll say anything that those of you who haven't had a chance to play yet wouldn't want to hear. But we've both been playing the single player campaigns. We've finished those over the past week. We've spent a little bit of time with multiplayer.

They just unlocked Titanfall 2. So we only got a few games in. But I figured we could start with Battlefield since you wrote a piece about it that is up on the ringer.com right now. I did. It's, you know, Battlefield is one of these games. You know, every shooter kind of has, like, its own character. Overwatch is the game I play when I want to be on a team. Call of Duty is the game I play when I just want to feel like a very powerful person.

Battlefield was kind of like the game when I just didn't want to have to talk to anybody. I want to, like, lay on a hillside and watch 40 people run below me and I and snip them every once in a while. Yeah. This battlefield is the best one I've ever played, certainly for console. Like, I've always had an issue with the handling of battlefields. Something about the way they port the game over to console. It just feels the controls, don't feel as precise. It feel floppy.

It feels, you know, I make a move, and it feels as if it takes a second for my avatar to respond. This game, it doesn't feel that way at all, and it is gorgeous to look at. It really is absolutely beautiful to look at. And that's part of the thing I wrote on my piece is like, savage murder and stabbing people with bayonets has really never looked so good. Yeah, it's distractingly scenic. I almost don't care about the carnage. I kind of just want to admire the hills and the greenery and then all the violence intrudes. But, yeah, I haven't felt, I guess, this overwhelmed by just the prettiness of a game.

I mean, when we last spoke, we were both pretty blown away by No Man Sky's technical achievements. But this game just aesthetically speaking and technically speaking is just really impressive. And I guess maybe in the middle of a hardware generation when the thrill of the release titles wears off and developers start to get better at unlocking the power of the hardware, but you've sort of seen it all and it's harder to wow you. But this game consistently did, whether it was just the draw distance. and everything you could see in the detail or as you mentioned in your piece, the smoke and the fog that is always rolling in or rolling out and looks really good even on consoles. And there's these little details too.

Like when you go prone and crawl through the mud, mud appears on your gun. It's like over time. And you don't notice it at first that it happened. And then it kind of like falls off, like dries off and just disappears like over time when you stand up. But it's little details like that that are just. absolutely amazing. The lens flare is not overdone. You look at the sun. It looks, it's very natural lighting, dynamic weather. All the smoke blows in the same direction as the wind is blowing. There's these little things that happen that's just absolutely incredible. It's really amazing.

Yeah. And we haven't mentioned the destructible environments, but those are impressive too. I mean, it's been 15 years since Red Faction, so you'd think that would just be par for the course now, but it isn't. And in Battlefield, you're never entirely safe. You'll be cowering in a house and then suddenly that house will not have a wall or not have a roof. So that really opens up the levels. And the other thing about Battlefield is that if you missed World War I week in high school history class, Battlefield is a pretty good crash course. This game really wants to teach you about World War I. Yes.

You will know the origins of daylight savings time. You will know the national history of Latvia via text updates on menus. This game is pretty heavy-handed about teaching you. about this war, which I guess makes sense since it hasn't been the typical setting for this franchise and most shooters in recent years. Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I was trying to think, like, what's the next conflict that they could go back to after, you know, previous to World War I where it's not players having to load their guns and it taking like 20 to 30 seconds to like pour powder into like the breach and all. Yeah.

I guess the Boer War is that even like, was that it? It was that big time enough? They had Gatling guns, right? Sure. So that was like the first Gatling gun war maybe. The thing I like about the World War-Worne aesthetic, though, is that it feels a little less like you just die. Although there is a lot of dying randomly. But it's not like a jet bombed you with some, like, you know, guidance missile or it's like an M1 Abrams tank.

You know, like the planes feel a little bit more papery. They're easier to bring down. The tanks are not so overpowering. it generally feels a little bit more accessible, even though it's 64 player multiplayer. So it's like, you know, that one spot up on the hill snipes you and you had no idea that person was there and you die. Right. And it's not easy to pick out enemies. And once you pick them out to tell if they're on your team, so there's a lot of confusing death.

But you're right. I think it is sort of the sweet spot technology wise or military hardware wise. And I was worried about that initially because when you play the campaign, there's sort of a prologue where you just die and you assume control of various figures in this one battle. And no matter what you do, you die, which is just getting you into the World War I mindset. And then there is sort of a five-chapter campaign. And the first chapter is almost entirely in a tank. And it wasn't the best choice. It was probably my least favorite of the chapters.

and it controlled okay, but the tank is just sort of this lumbering thing that it feels more primitive than the tanks were used to driving in video games. So I wondered how that would translate to multiplayer, but it does seem as if everything is sort of just slow enough that you can actually control it and shoot at it and it looks plausible. And if it were any more primitive, it would probably be too far back. Yeah, I've never been good with the vehicles in battlefield at any of the iterations of any of the games. I can drive a Humvee, you know, like Battlefield 2, I think it was modern combat. Like, I was pretty good at that. You know, I can drive the smaller vehicles, but I'm terrible.

Like, I'm just glad there's no helicopters because that's really the tough one. I don't know if you've ever tried to drive a helicopter in battlefield, but it's very tough. It always ends with me crashing about five seconds after I took off. Yeah, it's like the dodo from GTA 3. Technically, Airborne, but barely. I was actually impressed by how the planes handled in single player, but I haven't racked up that much flight time in multiplayer yet. But that was probably my favorite chapter was the Air One. I had as much fun with that as I've had with probably any flying and shooting games since, I don't know, Crimson Skies or something. Like every flying game sort of falls into that dogfight formula where you just, you know, there's an arrow pointing

toward the plane and then you pull back on the joystick and you turn that way. And then you shoot and then you find the next one. And this one, I thought it handled pretty well. And there was a good diversity of targets. So I'm looking forward to spending more time in planes in multiplayer, not riding with you when you're crashing those into the side of a mountain. Well, that's like one of the issues that it's dogged battlefield, like, since its inception, is people queuing in the spawn menu waiting for the plane to return to the map so they can, like,

just jump in it. that and everybody choosing snipers and sniping you from like wherever that and not playing the objective but the other thing that that is great about the world war one conceit is that you know it's always feels like they have to fudge the speeds of jets you know especially battlefield three and four you're talking about supersonic aircraft there's no way that you could ever shoot them and some you know like it's so that it feels more logical that these like very papery biplanes would kind of just kind of glide across the sky rather than shoot supersonically across the sky, which they don't. In Battlefield 3, they seem to kind of just float across the sky.

Generally, yeah, I think this is the best one ever. I enjoy it. It's the first one with a carrier pigeon, right? Or in Battlefield lingo war pigeon? Yeah, I haven't played that mode at all. I've just been playing the 64 player conquest. Well, there is a level in the single player where you can briefly take control of the pigeon. And I guess that crossed off the pigeon item on my bucket list.

So the nice thing about it is that whenever you die as a character in single player, it will flash the character's name and birth date and death date. And that is also true if you die as the pigeon. So if you get killed as the pigeon, it will say Daniel Edwards 1895 to 1918. And it looks like the pigeon was a 23-year-old man named Daniel Edwards. But I enjoyed the variety. That was a nice little touch. And as a New York resident, it was nice to control the pigeons instead of being at their mercy. Yeah.

It's a really, really fun game and less glitchy than Battlefield has been in the past, at least as I've seen so far. Yeah, I haven't had any issues yet. And the multiplayer felt pretty frantic, but not in an overwhelming way. I wanted to get better at it and get my bearings and learn what was where. And I'm looking forward to spending more time with that. And single player was fine. I felt like it was mostly just an introduction to the multiplayer. And as it always is with the stage.

Yeah, right. I mean, they disguised that a little bit better than usual, I think. There were definitely some set pieces in there that you couldn't really replicate in the multiplayer game. But for the most part, it was just sort of scenarios that you might encounter in multiplayer and that prepare you well for that. And the story was, you know, you take over a different person in each chapter. So it's sort of abrupt each of these people. has a backstory and you're supposed to get to know them, but each chapter is maybe an hour long.

So, you know, in the tank level, suddenly this guy is going, oh, I've done my whole sodding life is live my life by the manual. And I'm like, I just met you 15 minutes ago. I don't know you. So, you know, it was as good as it could be for what it is. Yeah, I found it. I found it a little strange, honestly, to just tonally to all of a sudden. You know, it's like you're playing this game that is absolutely brutal. And then the single player is like, oh, here's the people that died and they're going to help you learn how to fly a plane.

You know what I mean? Like, they're here to teach you how to throw a grenade. That's what their lives are for. It's just kind of like struck me as a little strange. But I like, I respect the effort put into trying to do something like that. Because, you know, like, yeah, battlefield single players are usually quite cursory. I don't think I have played more than a level of Battlefield Force single player. Yeah.

And I didn't play any of. battlefield hardlines single player ever, not even once. So if you had to guess is the same multiplayer that will be in your rotation for a very long time? Oh, yeah, I would say. So, like, I've been playing a lot of Overwatch, although not over the past week, just because that game's really satisfying, but that's the kind of game that I need to communicate with people, I need to talk to people. There's certain times when I just want to play a game and just be amoral and not have to, you know,

have the burden of carrying a team and talking to people. Battlefield is perfect for that because it's these huge landscapes. You can just run around, look at the sky sometimes. And, you know, there's 63 other people out there doing things. There's no pressure on you to do anything except whatever you want. So I think, yeah, I'll play this. I'll be playing this for the foreseeable future for sure. All right.

Shall we move on to Titanfall 2? Let's 500 years into the future. It feels like we're going on this game. Yeah. Yeah, you and I just played a few games. And it was quite a change to go from Battlefield 1 to Titanfall 2 just in the mobility of your character. I mean, as you mentioned, battlefield controls just fine. But in Titanfall, you are essentially doing parkour wherever you want.

You have a grappling hook. You have wall running. You have double jumps. You have boosts. So you can come close to flying around a level if you'd like. So I definitely felt freed from the bonds of gravity when I went from one to the other. Did you play the first one at all? No, I didn't.

I'm one of those people who kind of holds out for single player in multiplayer games for no great reason. So that was enough to make me hold off just because it, you know, it didn't seem like the multiplayer was a must buy on its own. Yeah, it was, it feels, I'd have to go back and really see, but it really feels like they amp the movement speed even from the first one. It's just, you're just flying around the map this time. Yeah. A lot of freedom of movement. It really reminds me of mirror's edge. This is something like we talk about with Vince a little bit,

but there's like some mirrors edge in there, just in the way you can slide under things. And the wall running was in the first one, too, but it just feels extremely fluid this time. It's really interesting movement choices. You can even go up zip lines, which I still don't understand. It seems to defy physics, but you can do that.

So my initial hot Titan fall take was that I expected more Titans to fall. That's the... But ultimately, that didn't bother me. I mean, in the single player campaign, you spend the majority of the game, not in your Titan, I would say. And I didn't mind that. I think absence made the heart grow fonder, really. I liked getting back into the Titan when I'd been on foot for a while, but I didn't necessarily want to be in there the whole time because you feel a little more restricted in your movement and the gameplay changes a little bit when you are in this giant lumbering machine. So I liked,

the variety, but I don't know whether some people will find that they expected more Titan in their game called Titanfall. Well, this is the interesting friction, really, with a lot of games in Titanfall in particular. How do you balance like a power up with normal gameplay? I mean, I guess, you know, with Destiny games of that ilk, there's a cool down period. And then as you score points, be that capturing objectives or killing people, you know, you power your energy level up and then you all of a sudden can use your ability. It's the same thing with Overwatch.

You know, you can doing things within the game that are positive for your team powers up your ultimate ability. But the thing is with Titanfall, your ultimate ability is kind of the point of the game. Yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting how they decided to balance how often you can get it. Yeah, because I mean, it could just be a straight-out meck game, but I don't know if there's a way really to satisfy, you know, all parties with it. It's like, do you make it a timer?

Do you make it, you know, an achievement-based cooldown? I mean, it's tough. Yeah, I was, it's the same way. You know, in our round, we played a couple rounds of like a capture the point game, typical capture the point game. And I think the most I called my Titan is twice in a game. I guess that's, you know, you'd hope that would be about average, I think, right? Yeah.

So, and there was some feedback based on the alpha, right? The internet wasn't thrilled with the, amount of Titan in the game. But yeah, I think at least with the single player, since that's what we've spent most of our time with so far, it doesn't feel to me like a tacked-on demo of the multiplayer mode. It is a fully fleshed-out single player. I would play it and not consider myself to have been cheated, even if I weren't interested in the multiplayer for some reason.

It's a standalone product that I think holds up. And the storytelling was better than I expected it to be really. I think on a on a macro level, you know, it's just a fight against some giant entity that is evil and trying to kill you. And there's a super weapon of some sort and you kind of, you know, zone out on the actual details and just it's a video game plot. And you don't pay attention to the specifics. But on the more micro level, there is this relationship between the protagonist and the Titan. That is really interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, it really adds a nice element to the game. It's almost like a dog in Half-Life II kind of relationship where you are bonded with this one Titan and he takes on a personality or it takes on a personality. And I'm using the pronoun for a person, which I guess is indicative of the fact that I form some bond with this machine. And there's kind of a lighthearted tone to it at times. There are just little touches. Like when the Titan prepares to throw you over some gap, you can see it sort of warming up as if it's, you know, a big. baseball player making a throw from the outfield or something and nice little touches like that. Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting choices and I hope that they get some recognition for some of the really interesting choices that they made in the single player.

I mean, there's elements of like sci-fi horror, like a dead space vibe in the single player. There's Mirrors Edge, as we said. There's some portal kind of mechanics in the platforming sections. There's a lot of platforming. There's a lot of platforming. lot of platforming, like a shocking amount of, a shocking amount. Yeah, not the greatest sign about a first person cheaper usually, but in this case, didn't mind it. Yeah, it's really interesting. Like, a lot of, like, really interesting problem solving type platforming things. And then, you know, the decision to

make the Titan sentient is really interesting to me because it kind of adds this level of, like, sadness to this, you know, you play the multiplayer and it's like these Titans get blown up. And then it's, like, so they're dying. You know, like, and it's like, it's. And it's like, it's. And, It really adds an interesting element to the game. It's almost like, you know, the stories you hear about, like, guys just to take it back to World War I, like, people, you know, soldiers who wouldn't name their horses because they just kept, like, getting shot out from under them. And so Titanfall adds this with this whole sentient relationship with your Titan. Very interesting single player mode. And there's even sort of a halo-like vibe early on in that you kind of crash land on this planet and you are sort of separated from the main force and you kind of have to.

strike off on your own and find your route back to the mean force. And even if you don't really care about the larger conflict going on, there is a smaller conflict involving you and your Titan that is pretty compelling. So I would recommend it just based on that. We haven't spent a ton of time with the multiplayer, but just based on the few rounds we played, I want to play more. Yeah, very interesting. Like the single player, I was not, you know, I had no expectations because the first one had no single player. Right. So, yeah, I was pleasantly surprised. surprised that it really dealt some of the really kind of brave design choices really interesting mechanics involved in that single player one choice that was not the bravest protagonist name is

jack cooper can we can we do better than that I don't know if that's like a self-referential like making fun of boring bland video game leading men names but jack cooper's up there with the most generic of them yes Sam fisher needs to defend his generic Eric Name Corner. All right. Should we talk to Vince? Let's talk to him. All right.

We'll be right back with the father of Titanfall 2. All right. So we are joined now by Vince Sanpella, who is the CEO of Respond Entertainment and the man responsible for stealing many of the hours you have spent firing fake ordinance over the past 15 years instead of doing something more productive with your time. Vince, thanks for coming on. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So I'm one of those stubborn people who still hopes to see a single player campaign in his online multiplayer games and Titanfall to caters to that crowd with a fleshed out campaign. Are you surprised that the market kind of pushed you in that direction after Titanfall and that there's still an appetite for a solo experience in 2016 when obviously there's no shortage of potential multiplayer partners? I wouldn't say surprised. I mean, there is a lot of multiplayer games out there already where they don't have the single player component.

People are okay with that. But I still think there's a lot of people that want more, more. story, more kind of play at your pace, less stressful kind of entertainment. So I still love single player games as well. So it's not too surprising. As someone who's been involved in numerous games that have altered the course of the first person shooter on consoles, how do you view Titanfall within that arc of games? I'm thinking of whether it's Medal of Honor, the various called duty games. How do you see Titanfall fitting into that evolution? I think it's been like, you know, early on it was hard to play first-person shooters on a console because the controller,

people didn't have the skill or the controls weren't as good to be able to kind of navigate the 3D space as well in a shooter. I think we've gotten kind of past that, and people are now pretty good at it. They understand it. And so now we're able to add like another layer of complexity to that with the more verticality and it adds a little dimension kind of to the game and to the movement. So I think that's pretty nice to see, just something a little different. And do you think that the pace of innovation in first-person shooters has slowed?

And if so, when would you say that that happened kind of after the initial figuring out how we control a character in this space? That's a good question. I mean, I think we're seeing people focus more on story. Once you get kind of the controls, the basics down, and the game is at a place where you can control it, you see people focus on more artistic things. which is good too. So we see like a maturing in the industry in the way we tell stories and the types of characters and putting more emotion into things and taking it a little more seriously. So I think I think that's good too. One of the innovations of Call of Duty was the kill streak mechanic, which is basically a power-up

where the player by killing enemies powers up a meter that gives them access to certain more powerful weaponry. Certainly the Titan is a variation. on the power up, how do you balance when a player can call a Titan, how often, what's the cool down? What's exactly the mechanism that goes into kind of balancing that mechanic? It's really just elbow grease. A lot of trial and error tweaking. We'll adjust it as we see, like when the game goes live and millions of people play it. They'll play it in ways that we didn't necessarily think of or anticipate. So we'll constantly monitor that and see. see how it feels. So it's just a lot of tweaking, tuning, gut check, kind of does it feel right?

Is it good? Is the game fun? And that's really always the kind of the balance point of, where is it fun? In your platonic ideal of a Titanfall game, like what percentage of time does the player spend in his Titan? Is it 80-20 on the ground? Like 80-20 running around 20 in the Titan, less, more? I think it's really a personal kind of question for a lot of people. Like, I will spend more time in a Titan than, you know, than somebody else maybe. And they like to maybe have it there as a buddy to kind of distract and aid them, but they don't necessarily need to get in it. And they like the acrobatics of being a pilot. So I think that's kind of a more personal choice. And there seem to be a lot of influences in Titanfall, too, whether they were intended

or not, you play it and you can kind of feel as if you're seeing a little bit of dead space at times or Half-Life or Portal at times, maybe in the relationship to your Titan or Mirror's Edge in the control scheme. So were there any explicit influences or games that you used as touchstones during development? I mean, if you look around, there's 80 people on the team that all are influenced. So I would say, absolutely, you know, I don't know that I could name them all. There's probably, you know, little bits here and little bits there of things that, you know, that you like and that work well that you pull from, you know, film, TV, movie, other games.

So definitely, you know, like there's the kind of style of game of like more half-lifey is definitely an influence, I think, on all of us just in our whole career. I wanted to ask about the choice to make the Titan sentient. Super interesting choice. And it adds like a level of almost tragedy to calling these things in. When I was playing the first Titan fall, you know, these things would get beat to hell. And then you'd launch out of them. And there was never any kind of inkling that, oh, this, I might have a relationship with this vehicle. How did that choice come about?

I think it's just in telling a different story, telling a richer story, advancing kind of where we were from the last game. I think that kind of came through in a way that we wanted to tell the story about technology and reliance on technology and where's the line and what's good and what's too much. And do you feel that some shooters take themselves too seriously? I mean, there's a lighthearted tone to Titanfall, too, at times. Obviously, there's the opposite of that at other times, but is it a tough line to walk tonally going from, you know, slaughtering people to then cracking jokes? And is it any easier to walk that line when you're talking about a fictional conflict like this one as opposed to, say, World War II? Oh, I definitely think it's easier when it's fictional. You know, you treat real subject matter with much more reverence and it's meant something to a lot of people, especially something like World War II, you know, kind of change the course of human history in a lot of ways, you know?

When we're doing something that's more fanciful, we can do more. So it's not, I mean, for us, it was just we wanted to have some kind of comic relief in there. I don't think that it's a necessity. You know, the great thing about the art forms like games or anything, it's that you can kind of have your own type of expression that not everybody, there's no like right, wrong answer. I mentioned briefly some of the games that you've been involved in. And they are really like landscape shaking games for the console. How do you view your own role in terms of the development of the FPS on the console? When you think of what you've contributed to the genre, what do you think?

I don't know. I mean, I just do something that I enjoy. And I'm lucky enough that, you know, I've been successful. And I work with a great team of people. You know, some of us have worked together for, you know, 17 years now. So, you know, it just, I feel lucky to be able to do what I do. and have the success that I have. And, you know, I just think about it as we do things we enjoy,

and the fact that fans enjoy them, too, is just amazing. And when you think about porting these games or adapting them in some way to other platforms that you haven't worked in as much specifically with Titanfall Frontline, for example, which is a mobile experience, it's not just sort of a stripped-down, watered-down mobile version of the game. It's a completely different take, you know, kind of a card-based game. Is that a choice that you made because you don't think shooters work as well on mobile and you can't have the same kind of mechanics on that platform? Or was it just a choice because of resources or other games that have succeeded following that model?

Yeah, I think just porting it to a tablet or something wouldn't be a good experience. So that was never really an option. So then it was, you know, getting the universe out to more people, exploring different areas. and, you know, the card game thing is a great way to kind of contain all the various elements that we've built over the last two games, and then also expand them and tell a little more of a story. It strikes me that there's like several kind of meta levels of control and gaming in Titanfall you play as a pilot who controls a robot, who is sentient in his own right. And it seems to me that among FPS's Titanfall kind of lends itself naturally to alternate control schemes,

whether it be secondary screening or VR, AR. Have you ever thought about how you'll implement those things in the future, if at all? We've done very little. I mean, we've had Titanfall running in VR. And, you know, one of the things VR does great is give you a sense of scale. So great thing. You're on the ground. You're looking up at this 22-foot-tall Titan, and you get how big it is more than you can in any other experience.

So that part's amazing. And then jumping in the cockpit and being able to look around the cockpit, it is amazing. And then once you pop out and start moving at 100 miles an hour, it's a little disorienting. So I think we would need to solve some problems first before it would be a good VR experience as is. I mean, you've been in this business a long time. And when you started out, it was kind of just you just do it, you know, whatever that meant at the time. You just make a video game. Now there are college courses, things of that nature. You could watch videos on YouTube and take classes until you had a code.

How has the industry changed in your time in this industry? I think we're starting to, like, we're starting to get a lot of employees that are coming out of school programs that are, you know, much more primed to go and to do things than, than I think ever before. So that's great to see. There's like more of a wealth of people coming into the, talented people coming into the industry, where before everyone had to be self-taught, so it was a little harder to, uh, to find those people.

What was that like when you first started out? Just, I want to make video games. And then there's not real a roadmap, you know, when you started out. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it, like some of our guys started out with modding, you know, like Quake games or something. So there was a little bit of a roadmap, but it was kind of something you had to seek out on your own on the internet. You know, there wasn't a course.

You weren't going to school for it. So it was still there, but you had to be a little more industrious. And do you think that that has helped or hindered? creativity. I mean, if there's an actual course you can take on game development, does that then encourage developers to kind of go down the same paths, solve certain problems in the same ways? Or do you think that people still come up with innovative solutions? I think the people that are going to come up with the innovative solutions will always come up with the innovative solutions and more of them now have access to training. So to me, it's a benefit. So at various points in your career, you know, you've been involved in these extremely successful franchises and then, you know, at times it's been a source of friction. Do we continue to make games in this incredibly successful franchise or do we try to make some new incredibly successful franchise? So at what point does a franchise become a kind of creative millstone? You've made two Titanfall games. It's its own brand. It's its own entity now. I would imagine that the temptation is, well, we could keep making Titanfall games. And, you've made two Titanfall games. It's, it's its own brand. It's its own entity now. I would imagine that the temptation is, well, we could keep making Titanfall games. And, They'll make money and there's an audience out there for it and it's harder to start from scratch. But maybe it's also more fun for you to start from scratch.

That is an excellent question, one that we will be pondering over the next few months. I mean, there's with Titan Fault East, it's something new. It's something, you know, a universe that we're creating. So there's more avenues that you can take. There's a little more freedom there than, you know, something that's like, you know, real world based. So that gives you a little more kind of leeway in if we wanted to do more. Yeah, it's a balance. I don't know. We'll find it at some point, right? How do the resources that you have to commit stack up, you know, as opposed to, well, we're making the third game in a series, and we have the engine and we have the lore of the universe, and there are certain expectations that the player has, as opposed to doing something completely new?

I mean, in terms of time to release something, time to develop something, and just the resources needed, how does that kind of compare? Generally, the team is a pretty fixed size and we'll use all the resources either way. So there's not too big a difference there, I would say, with how we do it. There's a little bit of the games naturally need to get a little bit bigger each time. So we tend to grow a little bit as we build more and more games. But it's not super significant. 10 years ago, if I was really sucked into a video game, I could go on a, you know, obviously I was not as gainfully employed at that time.

But if I wanted to go on a 10-hour run of gaming, there wasn't a lot that could distract me. These days, there's any number of social media apps, there's streaming television, there's other games, there's Steam, which has more games than I even know what to do with. How do you approach really hooking a gamer in a climate that we have now where games are just one of a myriad of distractions that people can fall into? That's kind of the core of what we do, I guess. So you put something out there that you're proud of. You put something that's new and exciting and innovative. And for us, it's all about the feel. You know, these are games.

They're entertainment. So they have to be, you know, kind of emotional as well. But it really is that the core, that feel has to be right. What do you, how if you, if you would to reduce Titanfall to like that core feedback loop, core mechanic, what would it be? How would you describe it so many? It's really about a kind of a juxtaposition in scale. Like you are this small or normal sized, I guess for us, but a pilot with super agility and super mobility. You can kind of go anywhere as fast as you can get there, but you're a little more fragile.

And then there's this Titan, which is a giant kind of death machine and it fights differently. So it's about this juxtaposition of combat that flow very, very. well together. They have to be seamless with each other kind of in a map that has to house both of them. And both of them have to have areas where they can live. Pilot combat has to be great in certain areas. Titan combat has to be great in certain areas. And it has to give you the ability to, as a pilot, go up against the Titans sometimes and be able to have a good time. So it's kind of that mixture of size. Have you thought about an e-sports component at all? That's like an important strategy for a lot of different game developers now.

in order to create, generate interest over time. I don't know how much you've thought about that or if people push you to think about that. If you don't want to think about it, what are your thoughts on esports? It's a tough one because I think, you know, of course we would love our game to be, you know, taken up by the sports community and played for years and years. But I think it's a lot of work to put that support in for a small number of people that actually do it. And so what do you do? Do you put that in hoping people come or do you build the game as great as you can build it?

And then if people say, hey, this should be an e-sports game and they start to adapt it, then we kind of add support and features for that later. And I think we've generally focused on let's make the game good first because if the game's not good, no one cares. And sort of a related question to the topic of whether you want to keep making games in the series or move on to something new. When do you decide that you're done with the current game? Because, you know, there's no end date on release day anymore. You can keep putting out DLC for as long as you want, as long as the market supports it. Is it purely just a market-driven decision? Hey, X number of people bought our last release, and so we will keep making DLC for this game,

or do you decide at some point that just creatively you want to go in a different direction? I think at some point we'll cut it off, assuming, you know, there's generally a pretty steep decay curve where, you know, for all but the very few top games, where DLC sells, you know, great at the beginning, and then it declines pretty rapidly, and our focus is better spent on making something new. So now that could change. And let's say, you know, three months from now, it's still going crazy and people are buying it up and they want more and they're demanding it. Then, you know, we'll look at that. So it's kind of in flux, I guess.

That piece will be decided on the fly as we go in real time. A hallmark of your games over the years has been this kind of cinematic storytelling. I'm thinking of the way you kind of made a tutorial as part of the game by having characters within the game tell the player what to do. how did that develop? It seems like such an obvious idea now, but it was not a popular move at the time. How did that come about? I think it's just a desire to have everything be engrossing and draw you in. And the more you can do that without some kind of, you know, separate, obvious training thing that no one really likes. Right. Then the better the game is for that. And there's always, I kind of been this longing for sort of a shooter with an incredible.

story. It's sort of this white whale that you could have a shooter that has the great action and stacks up well in that respect, but also tells a story that is just as compelling as any movie or any other AAA title or any other indie game. Do you think that that is something that people should be shooting for? Is it a realistic goal? Is it a commendable goal? Or is the shooter just in some ways incompatible with being able to tell a very nuanced story? I think we're getting better at it. We're getting closer and closer to great stories. I don't think it's necessary for every game. Some games are just fun. I think for us, we wanted to tell a richer story. We want you to kind of be drawn into the universe. So it's important to us. Where do you see the shooter going over the course of the next five? If you had to look into the future, your crystal ball. Five years from now, what does shooters look like? Well, I would say for me, where I'd want to see them go is to be even more engrossing kind of tell a better story.

You know, we look, we constantly, you know, we're still a young studio. We've only done two games. So getting better at our process and at getting the production values kind of, you know, matching where we were before. So, and I think we're, you know, a huge step closer with this game. And I think just to kind of continue that where it's more engrossing, more believable, more, you know, emotional. I think that's kind of a great place for us to be. And why do you think the genre has been so sticky? You know, maybe the biggest release of these couple weeks.

I mean, this week, last week, next week, there is a huge shooter dropping every week at this time of year when studios want their big blockbuster games ready to go. Why are those big blockbuster games so often shooters, this venerable genre that has been with us for decades? I just, I think it's engrossing. It's something that's fun to play. It draws you in. It makes you part of the world. You know, just that feeling is good in a shooter. If you had to think of your one kind of like contribution to the genre, whether it's kind of popularizing sprint, which I remember the first time I sprinted in a Call of Duty game.

I was like, oh, why haven't I been doing this for years? You know, like, why didn't every game have this? And to be fair, there were other games that did it at first, but Call Duty really made it seem like it was insane that you had not been sprinting. every time. Mantling when you climb up on items seems so simple now, but it's kind of like, but it's a bedrock of FPS now. You've really pioneered a lot of these player movement mechanics. If you had to look back and think of the one mechanic in all the games that you've been involved in that has really changed FPS, what would you pick? Wow. I mean, at some point we took out health packs. Yeah, that was huge.

And I think that made kind of a big impact. And we're kind of, you know, in some ways you back to them. Things are cyclical, but I think that affected a lot of games and a lot of, it kind of changed the way you play a game where you're not constantly backtracking and doing things that aren't fun. It kind of, it keeps the game more engaged. So I would probably call that out. I agree. And are the roadblocks to that sort of thing usually technical limitations, or is it just a failure of imagination or just a kind of adhering to convention? Games haven't had spring. games haven't had mantling, so we're not going to have them either. It just never occurs to someone to add those in until someone comes along and says, why wouldn't you be able to do this? Yeah, I think it's a little bit of that. I think it's, you know, you don't want to stray too far from the proven formula sometimes.

It's, you know, it's not always safe. And, you know, I like to think that we try things that we think are going to make a difference in the game. And it doesn't matter if it's necessarily safe. You try it and you see what works. And, you know, we've tried some things that haven't worked, too, that we immediately took out because, you know, they sounded great on paper, but not so fun. So I think you have to be willing to take those chances to really to move things forward. Can you give us an example of something that sounded great on paper and backfired in play?

Oh, no, absolutely not. All right. Well, we will let you get away with that, I guess. You can, I'll play Titanfall 2. It's out now. You can find Vince on Twitter at Vince. Zampella, Vince, thanks for your time. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

All right. So thanks to Vince for taking some time to talk to us. Jason, nice talking to you. Same here. I hope they let us do this again. I hope so too. Many NPCs died to bring us to the podcast. So we have to be back to honor their sacrifice. So if you like this, let it be known. It can only help us. And feel free to find us on Twitter if there are games or topics you want to hear us talk about. Next week, we will probably be talking about yet another big budget shooter.

there happens to be another one coming out. It's called Call of Duty, Infinite Warfare. And we'll probably also be talking about some of the console news going on, Nintendo Switch and the PS4 Pro coming out. And what that means, mid-generation console hardware updates, very scary stuff. So we'll get into that next week. And right now you are hearing our theme song, which comes courtesy of the band SlumCuts. Thank you, SlumCuts, for letting us use their excellent song, No Way In.

No Video Game Podcast is complete without. some chip tune. So one episode in the books. We'll be back with a new episode of achievement oriented. Same place, same time next week.