Titanfall 2 has seen yet another resurgence due to its recent Steam port, and its player count is looking up once again. While this is great for veteran Titanfall 2 players and for Respawn, it may prove problematic for new players.
This is Titanfall 2’s third revival actually. Up until the Steam release, Titanfall 2 averaged about 500 players at any given time. After hitting Steam, player counts rocketed up to around 14k concurrent players on PC.
You may have seen the memes surrounding this resurrection, and how newbies may be affected.
Love the game, and the memes. Wish it came to steam earlier. from titanfall
Now to be fair, this is not the worst thing in the world. Challenge sometimes motivates players to get better at the game in order to hold their own in a fight. Around 80% of the initial swell of Steam players remained, judging by the numbers. The problem is that some players may see the skill gap as grounds to pack up and leave – and at least 20% did. And the meme posts, as funny as they are, highlight the actual issues that new players may deal with when faced with veterans.
Some good news for new pilots
Now, I have to say that if you yourself are a new pilot, and you haven’t been doing well – It’s not your fault. When you boot up the game and get into your first match, you’re hopeful and excited to play. Ideally, you’ve played the campaign beforehand, in order to get a feel for Titanfall’s movement. If not, well… you’re in for a bad time.
If you get placed against one of those god-tier pilots, you’re liable to get killed repeatedly. You’re still honing your skills, figuring out the movement system, and finding what you like – this is totally fine. You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but there’s going to be quite the learning curve. I understand if you get more than a little pissed off being killed before even taking ten steps. Stick with it though, and you will eventually start holding your own against the vets.
Or maybe you’re really good at first person shooters and you’re the ultimate secret weapon?
It’s not just Titanfall 2
This issue isn’t unique to Titanfall 2, of course. It in fact plagues lots of competitive online games, making them quite hostile for new players. One such game is Rainbow Six: Siege, where sometimes you won’t even make it out of spawn. The problem isn’t that the players are too good: they just have years of game knowledge, which is something that new players lack, and will not catch up with for a while.
I started playing Siege pretty much on release. Playing a more tactical FPS game was a new experience for me at the time. I’m gonna be honest with you, I spent the better part of a year eating s**t. This of course happened all over again when I migrated to PC, but eventually I got the hang of it.
I still see a bunch of new players learning the ropes every time Siege goes on sale – which is really often. I don’t go easy on them because well, I want to win too. But It’s not like I don’t feel bad for them, because I was there once. The point basically is that it will be frustrating at first, but it’s worth it if you stick with it. This applies to most, if not all games – except CS:GO, which is really toxic and you’re better off staying away.
The more pilots, the merrier
What I’m trying to say is that Titanfall 2 is an amazing game with an awesome community behind it. They want you to stay, and they’re really not trying to dumpster you on purpose. They’ve just stuck with the game for a long time and know it through and through, and it’s difficult to just switch that off. I mean, have you ever tried purposely being bad at a game? If you have a younger sibling you know what I mean, it’s pretty hard to do.
There have been some players on forums and the r/Titanfall subreddit that have called for veterans to ease up on the destruction. Some have suggested using troll builds, while others have demanded that vets stop USING THE DAMN SPITFIRE. On that topic actually, I really should warn you that you will encounter camping a-wall pilots with spitfires. It’s really weird when you think about it, camping in a game with such a well done movement system. It is what it is, I guess.
If you’re one of Titanfall 2’s new players, I urge you to stick with the game for now and push through. If you’re a veteran pilot, please give these new players a chance. Give me a chance too, cause I haven’t played in a year and I wasn’t that great to begin with. Titanfall 2 has been in limbo from the start, and I’m hoping that this third coming won’t be its last.
Or Respawn could just shadow-drop Titanfall 3 like they did Apex Legends and give us what we want.
