If you played Titanfall 2's Tech Test last weekend you probably have a few opinions about it. You're not alone. Tens of thousands of players have shared their opinions with Respawn, and the developer has decided to make some changes due to this feedback. These are the most noteworthy:
• Many players were wondering why Respawn changed the mobility from Titanfall 1. The developer identified two major issues they wanted to solve in the sequel. The first was that a lack of player predictability would often cause players to be shot from the back or sides. While flanking is an important part of gameplay death often felt random instead of skillful. The second issue was that close range firefights were overly chaotic due to erratic player movement. So, changes to pilot mobility stemmed from a desire to improve the gunplay, and not a desire to slow down movement.
Still, they've decided to tune air speed and wall-running speed to be faster due to the feedback.
While investigating this point, they discovered some unintended side effects that were causing players to lose momentum while wallrunning. This is fixed now, so players should once again accumulate and retain more speed when chaining wallruns.
Additionally, they're testing scaling back some of the dampening factors that were limiting bunny-hopping as they don't want these restrictions to impact normal traversal.
• They made some changes in Titanfall 2 that they hoped would incentivise players focus on game mode objectives. However, they observed that players would try to play the objective but fail, resulting in slower than intended Titan acquisition. They still want objectives to be the fastest way to get a Titan, but the goal of every player being guaranteed a Titan per match hasn't changed.
To solve this problem pilots will once again acquire a small passive amount of Titan meter every few seconds.
• The Titans' survivability has also been discussed. Respawn expects that Titans will live longer when players become more familiar with the new rodeo system. Though, this is an area they'll continue to monitor leading up to launch.
It's worth noting that the build we played in Los Angeles was a newer one, and it's obvious that some of the weapons did less damage to Titans in that.
• You might have noticed that they've reduced the number of dashes a Titan can do by one compared to Titanfall 1, but all Titans have access to a new Titan kit that provides an additional dash. This is because there are quite a few fast Titans in Titanfall 2, and they want these to distinguish themselves from the slower ones. Players complained that Ion and Scorch was far too slow, so they've decided to make the Titans' dashes recharge faster. We'll see how this works when going up against the faster Titans.
• The fade distance for enemy outlines has been reduced so they don't reveal pilots at extreme distances. This is due to players complaining that it was too easy to see players from a distance.
The next Tech Test is this weekend, so it'll be interesting to see how the feedback changes after these improvements and tweaks.