“Any time we move the view without your input that can cause motion sickness.”Īlongside these fundamentals, Respawn also started to develop Titanfall’s emblematic wall-run, which takes a central part in its overall movement system because it grants the speed boost that gives both games their kinetic emphasis.
“I think a big thing that causes motion sickness is a disconnect between what you’re seeing on screen and what you’re trying to do,” says programmer lead software engineer John Haggerty. Motion sickness in firstperson games is complex and subjective, but Respawn found that when they added view-bob but kept the crosshair fixed to the center of the screen it would feel like the player character was constantly looking left-right-left-right, causing some players to feel nauseous. “Intuiting from what they did, it seemed they had a big focus on making it so players could shoot the bad guys as easily as possible and not get motion sick, and not getting motion sick became a big part of Titanfall,” says multiplayer design lead Todd Alderman. For instance, Titanfall has view-bob to communicate an awareness of physical motion, but they wanted it to maintain some of Halo’s steadiness. The team didn’t adopt all Halo’s lessons by any means. “Then I could dance around him and see what did,” he says, noting how it deals with aim-assist, and how its stable view as you walk gets across a sense of Master Chief’s indomitability. As he began to block out the controls for the game that would become Titanfall, he’d load up Halo, the second level, and play its first encounter over and over again, killing off all the AI apart from a single grunt. “It’s still the gold standard,” says senior software engineer Rayme Vinson. This moveset and sense of motion emerged from the firstperson shooter greats.īoth Titanfall, which was released in March 2014, and its sequel, which was released in October 2016, were built in heavily adapted versions of the Source engine and therefore inherit the fundamental control systems of Half-Life 2.īut in sculpting the game’s actual feel, developer Respawn was also looking back to another classic, Halo: Combat Evolved. Titanfall is a model of firstperson fluidity and precision on gamepad, while also capturing a sense of your pilot’s – and titan’s – physical body.
This is a game in which you can traverse levels at fantastic speed and explore their full vertical heights, using a moveset which not only rewards skill but is also surprisingly intuitive to grasp.Īnd it feels great, even with a gamepad.