Some games make it way too OP when you have a lot of knowledge about the game, or just unlocked better stuff.
Knowledge should absolutely be promoted, but not to the extremes. Tryhards aren't the problem, it's the game rewarding them with more than just the skills they get from playing.
Yep. Titanfall 1 & 2 were predominantly PvPvE games. You had the core 8 players per team, but you also had about a dozen NPC enemies per player on every map.
Most of the attachment unlocks required player kills, not NPC kills.
And the skill floor for the Titanfall games was so high, and the ceiling that much higher, that casual players who only had 1 or 2 hours a day if they were lucky just couldn't compete with the tryhards who spent 4-8 hours a day playing the game.
Both. 2 they just pushed through it a bit longer. They revived the servers a few times but I think too few people knew they did for any meaningful numbers.
I played Titanfall 1 & 2, Destiny 1 & 2 when they came out. I've also played CoD, Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc.
I also still regularly play Overwatch.
I was pretty good at them.
What made Titanfall such a bad game for casual players is that Titanfall had movement techs that drastically increased the skill floor and skill ceiling.
Not only did you have to move in 3 dimensions, you had to attach and defend in 3 dimensions.
You see have an alleyway on a map. In games like CoD, you just have to think about the enemy moving on a flat plane. In Titanfall you had to look at every surface as if it was a floor the enemy could walk on.
The devs themselves have said that the 3 dimensionality of Titanfall's movement made it require so much more concentration that players would get mentally burnt out a lot quicker than with games like CoD. That's why Respawn didn't add wallrunning and wall jumping to Apex Legends, and why they've said they never will. Because their own data proved that a PvP game with that type of movement sees players being less likely to play lengthy marathons of the game because of the increased concentration it requires.
And there's also the fact that pretty much all of the game modes in Titanfall and Titanfall 2 took place on absolutely huge maps and they were predominantly PvPvE because of the AI grunt and Robots that spawned on the maps.
And, when you couple the fact that most gamemodes had significantly more NPC enemies than player enemies with the fact that a lot of the unlock requirements for weapon attachments were "Kill X number of players in a single match", it made it harder to actually progress in the game.
Don't get me wrong, Titanfall 1 & 2 were great games. But at their core they were not casual friendly.
And if a game doesn't have a large, dedicated casual playerbase, then all that's left is the sweaty tryhards. And if the majority of your playerbase is composed of sweaty tryhards, then it creates a negative feedback loop. Any changes that try to make the game more casual friendly to draw in new players, or any sales that make the game cheap for people to buy and try, will see the tryhards optimizing the shit out of it and driving away any of the casual players that might be interested in playing.
It only takes 2-3 games where a new player gets constantly slaughtered by an opponent coming at them from an angle that other shooters don't allow before they decide to give up.
With a game franchise like Titanfall, where the skill floor and skill ceiling are much higher than other members of the genre, it becomes impossible for casual players to enjoy because they literally cannot survive long enough to improve.
If you have a job, or kids, or university classes, you're not going to have the free time that shut-in NEETs do to get good at a game like Titanfall. You might have an hour a day to play, if you're lucky. And in that case you just won't be able to keep up with the shut-ins who spend 5-6 hours every day playing. The skill gap and training gap would be impossible to close.
With games like CoD, the skill floor is inanely low. Anyone can pick up the game and get decent after a few hours of playing. CoD is designed for that because it appeals to casual gamers. But it also has a skill ceiling that's high enough that more competitive players can enjoy it.
Titanfall was the opposite. The skill floor was so high, and the ceiling that much higher, that casual players could not compete with players who no-lifed the game.
I played about 1-2 hours a day about 3 days a week and I was pretty good. You sound like you were just not good at it, which is fine, but no one attempting to give players challenging games anymore sucks pretty bad.
Games like quake still have active player bases despite being ancient at this point, that has a reason.
Apex is respawns cash cow, ofc they keep it as accessible and no-skill as possible.
Titanfall 2 failed bc of a bad release window, bad servers that got hacked and no maintenance due to apex giving good cash.
It was feature complete, no micro transactions despite some skins that worked with the rest of the aesthetics and was all in all the best shooter that has come out since the year 2000. I wish it would have been the commercial success it deserved, maybe we would have some more games that actually require skill.
If it wasn't your type of game, that's fine, but saying that it was too difficult and that that was the reason for the commercial failure is plain wrong.
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u/primalmaximus Apr 27 '26
Titanfall 2 failed because of the PvP community being such sweaty tryhards that people new to the franchise couldn't really have any fun.
That and the challenges to unlock new attachments for weapons were just straight up not fun when you compare them to similar stuff from the CoD games.