Titanfall 2 Interview with Jon Shiring + Scorpio Questions Answered
Gaming Instincts had the chance to speak with the Lead Engineer of Titanfall 2 from Respawn Entertainment at E3 2016 after having a hands-on experience with Titanfall 2.
Leonid Melikhov
Hi Guys this is Leo from Gaming Instincts the Co-Founder and Journalist. Today we gonna be talking with Respawn Entertainment on Titanfall 2.
Jon Shiring
My name is John Shiring and I am Lead Engineer on Titanfall 2 at Respawn Entertainment.
Leonid Melikhov
Awesome. Game is 60fps just like the old?
Jon Shiring
Absolutely.
Leonid Melikhov
1080P?
Jon Shiring
Yeah.
Leonid Melikhov
On all consoles?
Jon Shiring
We’re not talking resolution, game’s not done yet. It’s not worth talking about it yet.
Leonid Melikhov
Ok, I see. How has the game been in development for?
Jon Shiring
Titanfall 2 shipped in March of 2014 and basically the whole company worked on updates and free patches and map packs for it. For about 8 months I think.
Leonid Melikhov
I was in that experience, I remember.
Jon Shiring
Cool
Leonid Melikhov
When the game launched, I played it and you know, it was kind of funny, game launched and it was super hype and about a month later it started to kind of slowdown a little bit. Do you think it was because of lack of content at first or there was something missing?
It was a good game in terms of foundation, but there was just something missing. And I feel like from what I played of Titanfall 2 and from what I’ve seen you guys put in an actual campaign, there is a lot more things, there are more titans. So, I think that’s definitely gonna help it out this time around.
Jon Shiring
Yeah, definitely one of the things we heard was people saying “we want more more more” So, we tried to attack that directly on Titanfall 2. Obviously, we have single-player now, we have an entirely new progression system that is going to be fun for people and people won’t burn through the content as fast as they did last time. I think people will be really happy when they’ll see all that we have.
Leonid Melikhov
Do you guys still have the burn cards, or no?
Jon Shiring
Not talking about burn cards.
Leonid Melikhov
Not talking about the burn cards? Reason I asked that is because I didn’t notice any. So, I just wanted to know if they were there.
Jon Shiring
Yeah, there were none in the build that you played.
Leonid Melikhov
Ok. I know people will want to know if they come back or not, that’s why I had to ask.
What was the most challenging thing for you guys to work on in Titanfall 2, both from a technical standpoint and design standpoint?
Jon Shiring
There were a lot of challenges. One of the big ones was how do do you do a single-player campaign while still retaining the core of Titanfall with mobility, pilot and titan? And we didn’t wanna do single-player that was just kind of like training with bots from multiplayer. So, we wanted to do a real story-based offline campaign mode.
For a while now, a lot of the first-person shooter single-player modes have been all kind of a standard formula that’s everyone has been doing. We really didn’t wanna do something unless it would feel new and different and so we did a lot of experimentation and trying to figure out what would single player be. We did a lot of 60 second bite-sized chunks and we had designers working on tons of them and we played through and figure out like “that one doesn’t work, this one does.”
How do we go further with it and build a game around it? What we have for single player is that it feels new and different and it’s not like any sort of campaign that we’ve on the team have worked on before. It’s something that has some good surprises in it and I think it’s gonna be pretty special.
Leonid Melikhov
How many hours in terms of length, what do you looking at?
Jon Shiring
We’re not talking about it in length here because it really does vary. From the tests we’ve done we’d say it is a meaty single-player campaign.
Leonid Melikhov
Ok. Do you guys have any kind of collectibles similiar to Call of Duty, maybe like Intel or backstory?
Jon Shiring
Not talking about it. Yeah, we wanna have some surprises for single player when people actually get to play it in October.
Leonid Melikhov
Do you have difficulties, easy, hard?
Jon Shiring
We do.
Leonid Melikhov
How many difficulties?
Jon Shiring
That is a good question that I don’t know for sure. I will defer.
Leonid Melikhov
Ok, you can email if you find the confirmation for that later.
Jon Shiring
Ok.
Leonid Melikhov
How is the online progression? You said it was different now. Before we had “Generations” do you guys still do “Generations” like prestiege?
Jon Shiring
Not talking about that ( laughs )
Leonid Melikhov
Ok, I see. How about this, what can you guys talk about? ( laughs )
Jon Shiring
I can tell you all about the new titans and the game mode.
Leonid Melikhov
Ok, sounds good. Let’s talk about the new titans.
Jon Shiring
Allright.
Leonid Melikhov
Which one’s your favorite?
Jon Shiring
The two we’re talking about right now is Ion and Scorch.
Leonid Melikhov
I played as the Ion one.
Jon Shiring
Ok. So, Scorch is all about the firepower. He has an incendiary projectile. He has flame-wall and he has the…You see the titans have that new Y ability? So his is a gas canister that will start to spread gas out and you can ignite the gas. It’s really good to trap people and catch them coming around corners.
Leonid Melikhov
It’s like the Pyro of the titans. Sounds pretty good.
Jon Shiring
Exactly. I really like Scorch and his kind of has his roots in the Ogre. His big and heavy armored titan.
Leonid Melikhov
Is he considered to be tanky because of his bulkiness?
Jon Shiring
Sure.
Leonid Melikhov
I remember in the 1st Titanfall we had that one guy that was tanky the big…
Jon Shiring
Yeah, the Ogre.
Leonid Melikhov
You had..
Jon Shiring
Atlust and the Strider
Leonid Melikhov
Strider was super fast. Atlus was like you typical assault soldier. So, are you still going with that theme where one has more armor or less speed? Or are you guys completely getting rid of all that, and they’re just unique on abilities?
Jon Shiring
It’s all different The Ion is more like the Atlus. In the game, time has past, Hammock doesn’t make the Strider, the Atlust or the Ogre anymore. They have new models, but you can see some of the lineage there. The ( long pause ) Scorch ( says thank you and laughs )
Leonid Melikhov
We’re only talking about 2 now… I mean you could mention something else ( laughs)
Jon Shiring
No no no ( laughs) You can see Scorch evolved from the old Ogre and you can see that Ion kind of evolved from the Atlus.
Leonid Melikhov
I’ve been told that the old titans are returning or no?
Jon Shiring
No. 6 titans and they’re all new.
Leonid Melikhov
6 titans and they’re all new? I thought it was 9 with the 3 old ones included.
Jon Shiring
Nope.
Leonid Melikhov
I see. 6 titans. And are you planning on adding more in the future?
Jon Shiring
We’re not talking about any patches or DLC.
Leonid Melikhov
Oh ok. That’s fine. What about the game modes? Titanfall the 1st one I think had Hardpoint and what else?
Jon Shiring
We’ve had a lot of modes. We had Pilot Skirmish, Pilot Hunter, Attrition and Capture the Flag…..uh..
Leonid Melikhov
Most people play Attrition.
Jon Shiring
Yeah. Attrition was our #1 and campaign was our #2. We have a number of modes that are gonna be returning, we’re not gonna be talking about all the modes yet. ( laughs )
Leonid Melikhov
Can you talk about something new?
Jon Shiring
What you played today was Bounty Hunt and that’s a brand new mode that we’ve brought here because it has lots of A.I. and a very target rich environment for people who might just get to come and play one match.
Leonid Melikhov
Right.
Jon Shiring
We wanted to have kind of mode that would be accessible to people.
Leonid Melikhov
Very fast-paced and quick in action.
Jon Shiring
Yeah. A lot of things to shoot at, but also gives you a chance to learn what your weapons do, what your abilities are and try out different classes in the limited time you get.
Leonid Melikhov
From what I understood. Bounty mode is where you basically go to a bounty area and you kill everything in sight as fast as you can to get more points.
Jon Shiring
Yeah. So, there is two factions in the game and they’re fighting over the 3rd faction called the “Remnant Fleet” and that is the A.I. that are dropping in those bounty areas. The A.I. come in increasingly difficult waves. At first they’re grunts, then you get specters and then you get some new A.I. Every time you kill one you’re getting points and the more difficult ones give your team more points.
So, you’re fighting over that bounty and finally you get the bounty titan and when you execute that titan and collect the bounty it’s a big chunk of points for your team. The two sides are fighting over a 3rd team of A.I.
Leonid Melikhov
It’s always a tied war going back and forth with the points.
Jon Shiring
Yeah. So, this mode is very based around fighting those A.I. We have other modes that are different, we have modes without A.I. and we have modes that are more players.
Leonid Melikhov
Ok. You will be talking about this more in the future?
Jon Shiring
Yep.
Leonid Melikhov
Sounds good. What engine is being used, Frostbite?
Jon Shiring
No, as you probably know Titanfall started with Source and we’ve replaced the render and ripped out a whole chunk of it.
Leonid Melikhov
Is it Source 2?
Jon Shiring
We’ve stuck with our Titanfall engine and we’ve done a huge amount of work to it. So, it’s even more weird custom thing that we got.
Leonid Melikhov
Ahhhh… I see. Cause I looked at it and I was like “well it doesn’t look like Frostbite 3.” But it runs way better than the original Source. Source was a very good engine for its days and I guess you guys did a lot of work I can see that.
Jon Shiring
Yeah. We have a new physically based render. We have depth of fields, we have HDR bloom. We have this really cool texture streaming system that one of our engineers worked on. So we did a lot of work to make it look…. ( pause )
Leonid Melikhov
Current?
Jon Shiring
Yeah, looks great.
Leonid Melikhov
I see. Why did you decided too stick with it, instead of going straight to Source 2?
Jon Shiring
That wasn’t even a consideration. We’ve built a lot of custom stuff to make Titanfall what it is and we wanted to continue down that path and continue to improve it. But, a lot of the ways we’re doing this is….rip out entire entire parts of the engine or replace it with something we’ve written and it is less and less like Source all the time.
Leonid Melikhov
You took the foundation of what it had originally. Lets take this out, lets put this in and customize to your own liking.
Jon Shiring
Not only did we do all of those rendering improvements, we have an entirely new audio system, entirely new physics system. We did major changes to our scripting engine to our scripting engines in the same amount of time. There is a lot of work that goes into it.
Leonid Melikhov
Why did you guys decide to go multi-platform?
Jon Shiring
I think, I mean…We definitely we wanted too…Look we make games and we want as many people as possible to buy them. And so…PS4 people weren’t able to try out Titanfall. We’re really excited to be bringing the game to PS4 while also making sure that it’s great on Xbox, great on PC. We just wanted to be..whatever platform you like to play on. That’s great, the game will be good on it.
Leonid Melikhov
I am sure you’ve seen Scorpio now?
Jon Shiring
Mhm
Leonid Melikhov
With those kind of specs I am sure your mind has been going crazy on what you can for future projects. What do you guys honestly think about where the Industry is going in terms of console generations? Do you think that consoles are slowly going away? We’re going towards more like the PC route or where you can buy different models like iPhone 6 or iPhone 7.
Jon Shiring
Having done a few launch titles now in my career. It is really hard to go to a small install base and try to wait for it to grow up. The really nice thing about this incremental approach is that we never have that moment where it’s like there’s only gonna be 5 million of these things out and we’re fighting over those 5 million people.
It is more work to have this sort of support for multiple generations in the same game, but it also gives us a lot of new opportunity to do big new things and have a huge audience that can play it. Definitely it seems like a lot of people are inspired by the incremental approach.
Leonid Melikhov
Going from what they have now too 8 cores, 6 tflops, 320 gigabytes does not like sound like an incremental upgrade to me at all. ( laughs )
Jon Shiring
No, no! That’s the great thing.
Leonid Melikhov
I thought about it, I was there at the conference and I was just like this is a new cycle.I like the idea that they’re letting you play a game on all of the devices, but that brings a question. How badly do the developer like you guys now have to downgrade for the lower entry platforms. How do you guys feel about that?
Jon Shiring
Yeah, it’s not something we’ve ever done before and the timing is such that we’re not gonna have to worry about it on Titanfall 2. I think it’s something that we’re gonna have to figure out as we go. It is an interesting problem of how you make the game great on the current platform or whatever the new ones. I don’t know yet what the right path will be, it’s something we’ll probably try a number of things.
Leonid Melikhov
I think we’re in a very interesting time for sure. I am very curios if they would allow for.. let’s say Titanfall 2 for example to allow you guys to release a patch or some kind of an update where now we can run this game in 4K. I wonder if that will be possible, and if it will be possible do you think you’d be up for that?
Jon Shiring
I don’t know if it would be and yeah. I am not gonna answer what the other company might do, but it is something that’s pretty cool. ( laughs )
Leonid Melikhov
It is something pretty cool so I am looking forward to that. What’s your favorite thing about Titanfall 2 from Titanfall 1, for you personally. The biggest change you think the game has.
Jon Shiring
For me….it’s single player.
Leonid Melikhov
Single player? I would probably agree with you on that because it’s just a whole different piece of content that you can go to.
Jon Shiring
And it’s a different experience then people had in Titanfall before but it’s still plays towards our strength of pilot mobility and we have now have this bond with the titan. You saw BT, our giant titan out there.
Leonid Melikhov
I am really looking forward too how character development will go and just things in general because this is a different type. You’re not talking to just soldiers now, you have these robots involved and all these things. So, I am really curios too see how the story turns out. I think you have a lot of interesting universes to play.
Jon Shiring
I agree.
Leonid Melikhov
I remember in Titanfall in the original game you guys had a lot of creatures in the background. Are you bringing any of those monster elements in some shape or form to any game modes or something? Cause I was like “look at that monster” I would love to kill it or something, it was just like a tease you know. Such a cool universe to explore and I just want more of it and I hope you guys have that.
Jon Shiring
You know it’s funny. Once Titanfall came out we’ve heard…..and you know how they do those word bubbles things?
Leonid Melikhov
Uh huh
Jon Shiring
We dd one of those and it was just the word “More” in like 260 point font with a bunch of little words around it We get that people just wanted more, more, more, more. They wanted to know more about this universe, more about the characters, more about backstory and so…
Leonid Melikhov
It just felt like an extremely well-polished multiplayer game and that’s it. It has so much in it that it could be in terms of potential. I always think that with sequels the game you actually wanted to do in the first place.
I always think that with sequels the game you actually wanted to do in the first place. Because sometimes when you’re making a game for the first time….you know it’s a new IP. You don’t know what people…how will people react to it when it’s released in public and then you look at it and you go like “oh shit” we should of done that but you didn’t know that back then, but now you do so you have all that power to make it good.
Jon Shiring
Yeah. What I found out is the only time developers get to really learn about what they’ve created is after it releases. When you’re just iterating on it you never get the chance to take a step back and look at the reaction to it and see what is going well and what’s not going well. Once you release the game, you take a step back, you listen to peoples feedback, you listen to what they love. We’re developers so when we play it we see what isn’t working the way we wanted it too and then you go and start over again and you can do….everything is on the table.
As you saw, we did a whole bunch of changes to our multiplayer game and it still feels like Titanfall and we’re really happy with how it plays.
Leonid Melikhov
We have a few more questions and I’ll be done, I promise.
Jon Shiring
Ok.
Leonid Melikhov
Now I know you said you can’t talk about the new game modes in particular, that’s fine. Can you tell us around how many are there?
Jon Shiring
No. Sorry.
Leonid Melikhov
That’s fine. So we’ve got 6 titans, you showed us 2, so there is 4 more too see right?
Jon Shiring
Mhm.
Leonid Melikhov
4 more to see right in the coming months?
Jon Shiring
Yes.
Leonid Melikhov
The game is coming out…
Jon Shiring
October 28th.
Leonid Melikhov
A week after Battlefield, how do you guys feel about that? Is it interesting to be competing with Battlefield or you looking at it as something else?
Jon Shiring
No, I think the games are pretty different. But you know, it’s not the same kind of audience we’re going for so I am not worried.
Leonid Melikhov
Right. A week after that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare comes out. Again, another shooter.
Jon Shiring
Mhm.
Leonid Melikhov
It’s gonna be a crazy months. Are you gonna be playing all of those games yourself? ( laughs )
Jon Shiring
I am gonna try too. It’s gonna be a busy time for me. ( laughs )
Leonid Melikhov
Yeah, I bet. Crunch time and all that and celebrating the launch.
Jon Shiring
I play everything. So…yeah I am gonna be all over everything that comes out this fall.
Leonid Melikhov
Awesome, sounds good. Well, is there anything else you’d like to say about Titanfall 2 before we take off?
Jon Shiring
Yeah. Before launch we’re gonna be doing a multiplayer tech test and so we want people to go to Titanfall.com and sign up for it. We’re not talking about when yet, but it’s something we really need everyone to join in and help us break all my code and all of the servers.
Leonid Melikhov
Is it gonna be like a open beta or closed beta kind of deal?
Jon Shiring
Can’t say yet. It’s gonna be a lot people.
Leonid Melikhov
A lot of people, ok.
Jon Shiring
We wanna have that massive scale of players hitting our servers, find all the problems so we release smooth launch.
Leonid Melikhov
With more content than what we played here?
Jon Shiring
Yes! There will be new things. There will be a new game mode in the tech test.
Leonid Melikhov
Awesome, sounds good. Well thank you so much.
Jon Shiring
Thank you.
Leonid Melikhov
Appreciate it.
Jon Shiring
Yeah.
