The world of Titanfall is rich in subtle and not-so-subtle lore. Below is a list of pages containing lore for the history and universe of Titanfall.
Factions[ | ]
- Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation - An oppressive Earth-based mega-corporation that has colonized the worlds of the Frontier in a bid to harvest their considerable natural resources.
- Hammond Robotics - A division of the IMC and successor of Hammond Engineering, the founding company of the IMC. Hammond Robotics are creators of the Titan system, responsible for much of the technology and resultant death in the world of Titanfall.
- Frontier Militia - Frontier settlers and outlaws resisting the corporate military forces of the IMC. The Militia is divided into many loosely-affiliated brigades, each responsible for fighting the IMC in a specific sector of Frontier space.
- Marauder Corps - One of the Frontier Militia's brigades. The MCOR is assigned to the Freeport System.
Characters[ | ]
Locations[ | ]
Systems[ | ]
- The Badlands - Home to the planet Leviathan.
- Freeport System - A Frontier system where the Marauder Corps Militia brigade is assigned.
- Yuma System - A Frontier system where the planet that is the site of Fracture is located.
Planets[ | ]
- Demeter - An IMC stronghold that functions as the refueling point for long distance jumps between the Core Systems and the Frontier. Without Demeter's fuel, travel between the two regions of space is nearly impossible.
- Harmony - Harmony is the site of a backwater agricultural colony.
- Leviathan - Named for the hulking wildlife that lives nearby, Leviathan is a jungle of a planet.
- Troy - An uncharted planet located within jump distance of the Yuma system. It is the crash site of the IMS Odyssey, and home to a small colony built by the ship's surviving crew.
Satellites[ | ]
- Airbase - A distant moon of the planet Demeter, it functions as a docking station for warships.
Weapons and Technology[ | ]
- Starships - Large spacecraft capable of traveling faster-than-light. They serve as transports for soldiers, fighter craft, and supplies.
- IMS Odyssey - Commanded by IMC Vice-Admiral Marcus Graves 15 years ago. It is taken over by Graves' executive officer, MacAllan, in an apparent mutiny and later crashed on the uncharted planet Troy.
- IMS Sentinel - An IMC supercarrier. Before its destruction over Outpost 207, it was the flagship of the IMC's Frontier fleet.
- IMS Colossus - A starship that was designated the new flagship of the IMC's Frontier fleet following the loss of the IMS Sentinel.
- Red Eye - The flagship of the Militia's 1st Fleet. While refueling at an IMC gas extraction facility, it is damaged by the facility's heavy defense turrets.
- Dropships - Small spacecraft capable of traveling faster-than-light. They deliver Pilots, Grunts, and Spectres to the battlefield.
- Drop Pods - Single-use transports launched from orbiting starships onto battlefields. They can transport up to four soldiers at a time, and self-destruct shortly after landing.
- Heavy Turrets - Stationary defense emplacements that auto-target enemy soldiers, Titans, and spacecraft. They can be hacked or caused to deactivate if damaged enough.
- Titans - The eponymous system of warfare, giant hulking metal bipeds capable of enormous destruction.(if you don't know this, you have a long way to go.)
- Pilots - Those who pilot the Titans and wreak death and havoc.
- Weapons - Tools of the trade for Pilots and their Titans.
Creatures[ | ]
[ | ]
The Titanfall Universe
|
There are several Battlefield Units, also known as non-playable characters, on the field at any given time, with different abilities, AI programming, and alignments. The inclusion of these NPCs function both to make the combat more complex and interesting and to make strategies take both the human and non-human perspective into account.
MRVN Automated Assistants[ | ]
Marvins are the ubiquitous non-playable enemies in Titanfall, and are manufactured by Hammond Robotics as workers. According to the Hammond Robotics site, Marvins are actually called MRVN Automated Assistants.
Spectres[ | ]
Spectres, unlike their counterpart Marvins, are autonomous "grunt" units for the Militia, and are designed specifically for warfare. Whereas the Marvins are workers first and fighters second, the Spectre class of autonomous units are designed specifically for fighting, making them formidable on the battlefield. Unlike the Marvins however, Spectres are controlled via built-in programming and artificial intelligence as opposed to remote control by a general or commander; while this makes them highly independent and useful for incursions into the line of fire, this removes the ability to control them en masse, which can be a disadvantage in certain situations. While they are generally easy to take out, their resilient body makes it so that it does take a little bit of punishment. The good news about Spectres is players can hack them with their data knife to create a personal army.
Heavy Turrets[ | ]
Designed for massive battlefield carnage, the Heavy Turret is a securely mounted weapon found most often braced in urban environments atop buildings and bridging chokepoints. With a considerable range of motion and advanced AI allowing for excellent target acquisition and tracking, Turrets are an important asset for a team in combat. Be wary though - the turrets are hackable, and can be turned against the team that owns it through the use of the Data Hack ability of the Data Knife.
Ziplines[ | ]
Ziplines are lines strewn across certain maps which allow for the quick travel from edge to edge in combat. The lines can be used in both directions, and is most useful during the Capture the Flag mode as entry and exit points for the flag locations. Titanfall is a game of fast and hectic gameplay.
Summary[ | ]
Players fight either on foot as free-running "pilots" or inside agile mech-style walkers called "Titans" to complete team-based objectives on a derelict and war-torn planet. The game is online multiplayer-only, but injects single-player elements such as plot, character chatter, and non-player characters into its matches. Respawn Entertainment founder Vince Zampella described the game as bringing "scale, verticality, and story" to first-person shooter multiplayer gaming.
- Players choose their pilot types and are dropped on the map, beginning the game. A timer displays the time until a Titan can be deployed, which is reduced by killing other players. Once deployed, Some Titans will project a shield around the drop zone to help protect the titan and pilot, ensuring a pilot to embark. Pilots are agile and accumulate momentum while running (similar to "skiing" in Tribes), which lets players run on walls and chain together double jumps. There are multiple types of Titans, each with unique abilities and customizable loadouts. Pilot and Titan controls are identical except where the pilot's double jump becomes the Titan's dash, as Titans cannot jump, crouch, or cover. The mechs are not slow, but their movement is slower than the nimble pilots. Titan game-balancing abilities include the vortex blocker, which stops and returns an enemy's shots midair, and electrified smoke, which hurts and repels pilots climbing the Titan's back. Player-pilots can eject from Titans that take too much damage, and the Titan replacement timer is reset upon the Titan's death. Games end with a race to the losing team's evacuation dropship.
Units[ | ]
Weapons[ | ]
[ | ]
The Titanfall Universe
|
This page is a repository of community information, speculation, and documentation for the game Titanfall.
Awards[ | ]
Titanfall has been the recipient of many awards. Check out the Awards page for details.
Interview with Abbie Heppe, February 3rd, 2014[ | ]
Sandoval: So one of the things that I noticed a lot in previous interviews is that you’ve made a lot of allusions to influences on Joel Emslie, the art developer and lead artist. One of those things was Ghost in the Shell, and there was also a lot of mecha stuff. So was that something that came early in the development in Titanfall, or was that influence what jump started the project?
Heppe: Not really, I think that once, you know, originally there was work on sorta power armor and stuff that was not really Titans, so definitely a lot of those things came along as the game was developing into more of a Titan-based gamed, and not just one, you know, not just a shooter. There were a lot of concepts early on, and so there was no day that we said okay this is a, you know, everyone, we’re making Titanfall, this is the game, this is what's going to happen. It was a much more organic process, and at a certain time, it became Titanfall.
Sandoval: Now, speaking of shooters, since you mentioned that, a lot of the kind of well known, I guess you could say titans of the industry, excuse the pun-
Heppe: That’s ok we actually hear a lot of titan puns, believe it or not!
Sandoval: Well, a lot of the titans of industry like Battlefield and Call of Duty have this very hardcore competitive edge to it; do you see that becoming a bug part of the success of Titanfall?
Heppe: You know, we get asked that a lot and you know you try to build a foundation for a fun game that is going to be awesome to play, you know . With Titanfall, we’re not going to be shipping with all the same features to support that that games that have been around for however many iterations, almost a decade I think for some of them, have, but I know that there's so much interest from the eSports community competitively, and we’re definitely interested in what they have to say. We can't build the whole game for them; we have to build an awesome game and hope that they enjoy that and are interested in picking it up and playing it, and carrying on Titanfall for the next few months or years. I think at launch it's going to be interesting to hear their feedback.
Sandoval: Now some of the feedback we’ve gotten [on the Titanfall wiki] has more to do with the servers, the Azure servers, how they’re kind of distributed, and there was a lot of concern, especially amongst Australian gamers, as to how that’s going to function with latency and things like that. Are there any plans going forward to make that experience better for them?
Heppe: Microsoft is building Azure servers in Australia, and I don’t know the exact date they go online, but they'll be going online later this year. In the meantime, we have been testing the game in Australia to make sure they don't get a super ridiculous milliseconds lag, and we are also having a beta, so everybody will be able to play and give us their feedback. Obviously we don’t want anyone to have a bad experience playing Titanfall, and I’m really excited that Microsoft is building data centers to support them; I know that there's a huge community of Australian gamers, and I know we had said at E3 last year that we thought they'd be there by now - they're not, but we're doing everything we can to make sure they get a good experience too.
Sandoval: I had mentioned earlier some of the influences in Joel and the entire team; what do you think have been the biggest influences on the development of Titanfall?
Heppe: It's one of those you know, it depends on what department you’re talking to, and what, you know, whether its design or whether its art. There’s tons of things to draw on, because they’re all looking at very different aspects; animation obviously had to deal with how they moved, and looking at parkour and wall running and looking at stuff to deal with that, and on the art team, there’s the great love of sci-fi and a certain very used future, which is the term Joel likes to use, and the design, you can see a lot of influence from very classic third person shooter games, like Doom and Quake and a little bit of Tribes. Not skiing, but that you’re using movement with momentum, so there’s ton of different influences, but I don’t know that i can break it down to three that would encompass everybody at the studio.
Sandoval: that’s one of the things that I noticed in the gameplay, it’s very…it’s not post-apocalyptic, but it feels like it, but very clean and very fresh post-apocalypse, and that’s really refreshing. Was that something that was done consciously or was it just an organic thing?
Heppe: Well, the look of the game is very much on purpose; we're not a post-apocalyptic world, the world of Titanfall is one that's at the edges of the universe, where people journey to build lives, and it's more like getting to the west after traversing the Oregon Trail, but in space. We want people to see Titanfall and say, “this is a bed, this a home”; we want it to be something that is very familiar, but at the same time, you're looking around and saying, “Oh my God, we're in space!”
Sandoval: Now speaking of these beautiful maps, is there any estimation on the number of maps we can expect to see on launch?
Heppe: We get asked the number all the time, and realistically, we want players to just go in and discover a lot of things about Titanfall for themselves, and the number of maps is one of those things. There are a lot, and they are very varied, even compared to what we're showing you today. Fractured has a lot of open spaces, and Angel City has a lot more vertical flanking and jumping off of buildings and sort of weaving in and out of these passageways. There are maps that are higher; there are maps that are totally different. We haven't even shown one of my favorite ones yet!
Sandoval: This seems to all have been very meticulously and conscientiously done. How much of an impact did the community have on the development of Titanfall?
Heppe: We are always listening to them. It's very rare that somebody is saying something about Titanfall on the internet, on twitter, on everything, and we're not aware of it. For us, we're building this foundation that is Titanfall, so there's a lot of things that we found interesting, or we incorporated, or added later, but this is the game we're making. We hear all of that stuff, and some of it is stuff for a future date, and some of it is stuff that would horribly unbalance the game if we did it. I think you'll remember when we were clarifying, 'yeah, this is a 6v6 game'; it's not that we haven't tested it 10v10 or higher numbers, it's that the game wasn't fun when we did that, and we need to make decisions that make it a fun game for everyone playing it.
Sandoval: There seems to actually be a really large fandom within the team, it feels like you guys are actually fans of what you're developing, and that's such an awesome thing to see.
Heppe: Yeah, well you know, we try to explain to people the reason why we do things, and the reason things are the way they are; a lot of people who are asking for things haven't played the game, so us doing the beta and getting the game out there for people to play and figure these things out for themselves is super important.
[ | ]
The Titanfall Universe
|