Taking notes from Titanfall 2

[Cizjut]

Been playing Titanfall2 for awhile, and coming back to UT4 I find some stuff that could be taken into account for the development:

Titanfall2 movement flows very natural. although I wouldn't like the sticky wallruns in UT4, I do like the longer wallruns since it makes map navigation easier.

Double tapping to climb 45 degree steps feels awkward. I think it would be better to jump and hold Space Bar to make the player stick to it and climb. It unifies the concept of "enhanced movement" in a single key.

Crouch and Slide are two buttons, but why though? I have never ever EVER seen anyone use Neutral Crouch in their whole life of playing UT since it's a fast paced game, however sliding into cover seems like a neat and viable tactic idea. Making Shift holding to stay crouched seems more sensible.

Titanfall 2 takes momentum and friction into account and makes the game movement interesting, yet, it doesn't have the (IMO) annoying Bunnyhopping. You can gain momentum, yet friction comes into play when landing. Sliding makes you keep a bit of that momentum for awhile on TF2, yet you can't abuse it like in Quake where you just keep gaining speed out of nowhere. For this effect, and because of Titanfall 2 concepts, the game suggests you to wallbounce to gain speed again; one of the well stablished rules of it. I don't think it can necesarily be implemented on UT4, but taking this into account for a test could take the dev team into an interesting new fun gameplay mechanic.

Overall the UT4 neutral movement speed is fine. Yet I suggest these because i see and find myself often stuck trying to jump into a platform and barely not making it, or over a crate or a slide, and not going up. There could be some tweaking to the movement to make it more easy without sacrificing what makes UT legacy unique.

[PayBack]

Awesome, I highly encourage you to download the editor and get to work on prototyping these movement changes. Please update this thread when you have something and I know of a few hubs we can test it out on.

[DDRRE]

The Titanfall 2 slide really is great.

[Cizjut]

I've been playing by myself recently and found about the Dodge Button on the bindable options, and I gotta say, it does the gameplay experience so much better and smooth that it's like i'm playing and entirely new game. I did another thread talking about this, because it's impressive to me how a simple thing can change the game experience so much.

The longer wallrun would make wallruns actually a "thing", maybe even gain a bit of speed while doing so, but the Dodge Button on SHIFT key is much more natural to the base gameplay and it's an incredibly good thing to have, that is, something that wasn't present on other UTs before.

[L1NK-]

The Titanfall 2 slide really is great.

Everything else about that game is pretty **** good that I'm playing it constantly, and I'm not the type to generally play CoD type of shooters. It has wall-running, grappling, sliding, bunny-hopping, even projectile jumping. The amount of crazy **** you can pull of is awesome and refreshing. Once you learn the movement it becomes a pretty fast paced shooter. Just take a look at some clips on /r/titanfall. Visual clarity is not an issue with their colour blind mode either. Honestly they've done a great job on the game and it doesn't feel dumbed down...

Mouse input feels fine too (Source engine) and it still looks great, even on dated hardware.

[Cizjut]

What makes Titanfall 2 so great and universally praised is that its movement looks like a complex thing with the momentum, dashes, wallruns and gadgets, but in fact it feels so natural and easy to perform because developers put emphasis on making it accessible to the player.

There's no point in hiding features in your game and app design behind complex actions and timings. The game itself focus on what it is important, and that is fighting the enemy and portraying the fantasy of GOING FAST.

Every time that someone criticizes arena shooters and detractors from the formula and format is because they are "casuals" or the arena players are "tryhards" or have no life playing the game, and somehow their skill is SO OVER THE TOP that no one could land a rocket to the face and kill his 150 HP.

In reality it's just the accessibility and game design faults. It is a developer fault, and I'm convinced of that.

In fighting games to RTS, bad interface or bad inputs are often overlooked because "it is what it is" and people just get around or over it and that's it, then they call it "skill" and exploit those who don't perform strange unnintuitive actions at start or straight up mock them as low skilled. It's funny and interesting how this paradigm keeps repeating after many years. And the product itself suffers, because the GAME and the metagame isn't focusing the players into the strategy or experience designed for them, but their attention gets shifted into mastering meaningless repetitive tasks that retract from the bigger picture.

When I think of Unreal Tournament and all its iterations, it has always been a easy game to learn but hard to master. But that begs the question

Is the "hard to master" feature of your game the intended one? And the most subjective but important one: Is it FUN to master?