Titanfall: did it need some alone time?

If you were to ask people with a real interest in gaming what they were looking forward to most this year, a good proportion of them would have said Titanfall. A first person shooter exclusive to Xbox One and PC, that has got main stream reviewers using words like 'groundbreaking' and 'revolutionary', to take us away from a generation of consoles defined by Call of Duty.

There's no doubt Titanfall will be successful. In fact it already is. Microsoft have aimed it as being the game that sets the bar for their new console, not to mention helping them reel in the PS4 after disproportionately better sales in the first six months after release. This isn't just speculation either, the release of Titanfall has coincided with the introduction of a bundle offered at £399 with the game, which is £30 less than the original RRP of the stand alone console.

Through the 360/PS3 generation one of the biggest emergent class of gamers was the online first person shooter. Indulge me as I paint the all too familiar picture of the masses sitting in front of TV's with their headsets playing against other like minded, COD loving gamers. Online multiplayer may as well have taken over the console world in a way that before you might have only imagined PC's to achieve.

Yet in the corner of all of these games, Call of Duty, Battlefield or anything else you might have been interested in was the pitifully short and effort lacking single player campaign. In then what is being seen as the proverbial game changer of the genre there were two ways to go: firstly, increase the time and effort put into the campaign to improve the quality to keep players interested for longer before they move on to the multi player as well as giving it some replay value that has been sorely missing in recent games. Alternatively, as the developers of Titanfall have opted for, scrap the single player all together and focus totally on multiplayer.

I might be tempted to say that this was a complete mistake. How can we call a game revolutionary if it just carries on down the path it's predecessors were pointing towards? That's simply not the way to think about it though; in my view these games that put minimal effort into the single player campaign were wasting time, no one that was buying the game was buying it for anything other than the online play, and lets face it, if you owned an Xbox and wanted single player, you bought Halo.

In my view, Titanfall wont attract new people to the FPS genre, but it might just steal some of the PlayStation faithful, and Microsoft knows that is something that is desperately needed.