Hi Titanfall fans! Welcome to the blog post from Respawn Entertainment and Gravity Well about Titanfall 3!
We released Titanfall 3 on the 10th anniversary of the first Titanfall game and we received very good reviews (better than usual AAA games these days) according to Metacritic in terms of both metascore and user scores on all platforms, which is something Titanfall fans wanted Titanfall 3 to be.
We also share some future stuffs we're cooking on like campaign DLCs and expansion packs amongst other stuffs.
Campaign DLCs and expansion packs[]
Just because the entire main story of this campaign has been wrapped up (though it has multiple endings) unlike the cliffhanger ending in Titanfall 2 campaign, doesn't mean we're not planning to expand the campaign with DLCs and expansion packs.
There are two types of campaign expansions; DLCs are small but free content additions, but it requires the base game, while the expansion packs are paid but large content additions that doesn't require the base game. They expand the campaign, not by continuing the main story (as the entire story is wrapped up), and instead add more details and playable side stories (some if not most are completely unrelated to main story).
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The base campaign only includes two missions featuring drug cartels; which are Standoff and Within the Crossfire and the reason of much fewer mission types included in the base campaign than in entire Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II campaign is because we don't want unnecessarily distract it from the main story, which is the fight between IMC and Militia in the Outlands.
Rest assured, the rest of cartel-related missions are be added later as a campaign expansion pack called "Narcotics in the Outlands", which will incorporate some stuff from cancelled Mandalorian first-person shooter game from Respawn in-addition to being dedicated for fighting the cartels.
Designing enemy Pilots on foot for the campaign[]
Titanfall 3 campaign wouldn't be complete without letting enemy Pilots actually fight against the player on-foot, but programming the AI is very hard for this particular enemy type, because the AI for it must account for the environment in-order to effectively use wallrunning and to the extent double jumping as we said before in this previous blog post.
To make it actually fun and fitting to actually fight against rival Pilots in campaign, we have three design constraints that developers (especially game designers for the campaign portion) at Respawn and Gravity Well should follow when designing the AI for enemy Pilots:
- Enemy Pilots on foot should behave similarly to actual players, but not even close to eerily similar to enemy players in multiplayer counterpart to the point of uncanny valley, though being too similar to actual players might be marginally acceptable for the offline-mode bots for the multiplayer portion.
- The way they wallrun and/or use advanced movement abilities like double jump and sliding should be unscripted (unless the story demands), allowing enemy Pilots on foot to appear outside boss battles, cutscenes, and quick-time events but at lower quantity than Grunts.
- Enemy Pilots should be challenging but fun to fight against and not frustrating (too hard) nor boring (too easy), with max quantity of these enemies appearing at the same time is 12 without being too hard or frustrating without using a Titan.
We also made two enemy types that is in-between Grunts and Pilots in two different ways; one that can change loadouts on-the-fly but they can't wallrun nor double jump (adaptability part) and another that focuses almost entirely on mobility and parkour, and it is dumber than actual Pilot's AI as we want this subvariant to easily scale up at larger quantities without being unfair to fight and easier for players playing as a Grunt in certain missions to deal with.
However, the whole Pilot AI thing we fully developed for single-player portion of Titanfall 3 isn't complete without mentioning friendly Pilots on foot, which although they already exists in Titanfall 2 campaign, it was scripted and only appears in one mission "The Ark" and the friendly Pilot AI in Titanfall 3 is unscripted just like enemy counterpart.
Any questions[]
Leave a comment for questions and concerns. Constructive criticisms are appreciated.