Titanfall Update 4 - Emblems, Burn Cards, Titan VO & More

Respawn has just released details on the next Titanfall update, which is pretty substantial (and pretty awesome!):

• Featured Game Mode - We're introducing Featured Game Modes into our playlist rotation. These are game modes that will be available for a limited time only. New Featured Game Modes will be introduced periodically to replace any outgoing Featured Game Mode. Our first Featured Game Mode is Marked For Death, and Wingman Last Titan Standing will follow shortly after.
• Marked For Death - A player on each team will be marked for death! Kill the enemy mark while protecting your teammate.
• Titan Burn Cards – 14 new burn cards that add amped Titan weapons and enhanced Titan abilities. You won't lose your selected Titan Burn Card if you die as a Pilot, only when you die as a Titan. There is an orange highlight around Titans that have Burn Cards equipped on the Titan Counter HUD and Titans with active Burn Cards have an indicator near their health bars.

• Titan Insignias – Want to show off your accomplishments? You can now select from a host of emblems to customize your Titan. Insignias are unlocked by completing challenges but if you've already completed the requirements, that emblem will be ready to use when the update installs. Two emblems come courtesy of Penny Arcade (thanks, PA!) and another recognizes users who completed the "Gooser" challenge the hard way.

• Matchmaking - We've made improvements to matchmaking & team balancing. Now, teams are rearranged just before the level loads, to further balance the teams' skill and player counts. You'll notice that you're greyed out in the lobby until teams are set. You'll also notice "Connecting…" as players join a match.
• Titan OS Voices – Players now have 3 Titan V.O. options to choose from including the classic "Betty" as well as Jeeves and Lisa.

• More Titan OS VO - New helpful warnings and observations from your Titan.
• Challenge Tracker – You can now select which challenges you want to work towards and find them easily. You can review your tracked challenges during a match by bringing up the in-game menu.
• Lobby Music – The ability turn lobby music on or off.
• Updated Menu Art – Menus get a new coat of digital paint with additional art. The Main Menu background movie has been updated as well.
• Audio - Killing a Pilot now plays a special sound effect to the killer and unique sounds are played when killing a Pilot or Titan via Titanfall.
• Auto-Titans – Your Auto-Titan will now use all Titan abilities. If you've equipped electric smoke, it will deploy electric smoke when it gets rodeo'ed. If you've equipped the particle wall, it will deploy a particle wall when it is under fire.
• Rodeo - You now see the name of the Titan you rodeo.
• Burn Cards – You'll notice a Triple Burn Card selector on bottom right of the HUD after you die. It's a reminder to use your cards and a convenient way to select them.
• Burn Card overflow protection - To protect players who have a full Burn Card deck from losing the opportunity to earn valuable rare Burn Cards, you may now exceed your maximum deck size. However, you must discard down to a legal deck size before you arm new Burn Cards. To make this less obtrusive, the maximum base deck size has been increased from 26 to 46.
• Burn Card Deck Limit tied to Gen level – Maximum deck size is increased by 6 cards per gen on top of the base 46 with a maximum of 100 for Gen 10.
• Drift Guard - New "Movement Drift Guard" gamepad setting in options.
• Unlocks – You'll still be able to unlock the Stryder and Ogre chassis by playing Campaign, but you can also unlock them in normal MP modes. The Stryder will unlock at level 15 and the Ogre at level 30.
• Win/Loss Streak – Your win/loss streak for the last 10 matches is now displayed in the lobby over the image of the next map.
• NEW FEATURES (X1)
• Achievements – If you bought the Expedition DLC for Titanfall you have a new set of achievements to unlock by playing the DLC maps.

Looks pretty substantial. I've been continuing to play Titanfall off and on since release, and updates like this should help keep it fresh.

All of that seems pretty awesome... although I can't help feeling like the game should have launched with a lot of this stuff.

We need to be able to unlock Titans without playing the campaign. Few people seem to pay attention to it and it took me forever to get into one game.

@believer258: Better late than never, but with this update finally allowing you to unlock them in standard multiplayer, it's basically going to be the final nail in the coffin for campaign.

level cap increase would be nice. as cool as the game is it just doesn't feel like i has decent longevity.

off topic but what happened to FPSs having crazy weapon variety like Perfect Dark? i think unique weapons with varied abilities and techniques to use them may help revitalize the genre, though i may be simplifying the situation a bit. i also know the Resistance series kind of did this so maybe it won't catch on (sadly).

Oh! Sorry, I didn't see that.

From the looks of this update, it looks like you can select a titan burn card in addition to a regular burn card. The balance changes which you haven't listed here is what I'm most looking forward to.

This is a lot of great content for free. Rarely see these kind of patches anymore, especially from major studios. TF2 is the only other MP shooter that comes to mind.
Also, Jeeves will be my go-to VO.

Looks like a lot of stuff, but I don't see anything that in there that is likely to result in me popping the game disc back into by console. I had a pretty heavy ten day affair with Titanfall at release, but seem to have lost any passion for it.

Have they fixed the sound bug yet, other than the placeholder fix of installing the game on a second hard drive?

Looks like a lot, but I wonder if it's too little to late to attract lapsed players back into it.

I'm in the middle of my 2-day trial. The game is a lot of fun. It's super weird that everyone I know stopped talking about/playing/caring about Titanfall within a month of release. There's not much actually wrong with it. I'm thinking of picking it up if any of the 50% off deals are still running. Took me about 20 minutes to find a Campaign match earlier, so it may take a while to unlock those extra titans.

Update 4 is now LIVE btw.

Marked For Death is a great game mode from the 3 matches I've played so far.

@ulquiokani: YAY!!!!

These are all things that are great additions, they needed to happen, but I think this matters as prep or 'being refined' for the next game. When the next game ships all these needed tweaks will be in place tested and refined, but I see this as paying off more in game #2.

Multiplayer unlocks for those Titans needed to happen. I downloaded the game for the free 48 hours and I've found it basically impossible to finish the campaign, certainly not twice.

@hunter5024: This update changes how you can unlock the other Titans. You unlock the Stryder at level 15 and the Orge at level 30. You can still unlock them in the campaign as well.

This is one of the reasons I bought digitally. Titanfall is fantastic for 1-3 match short bursts in between other games or just at the end of the day or whatever. It's not so great for long sessions.

The new Marked for Death mode is a lot of fun. Killing the mark is satisfying, and that knot in your stomach when you are marked and you realize they're all coming for you and they can see where you are is pretty intense. It should not be a limited time mode. I would much rather play it than Pilot Hunter AKA vanilla team deathmatch.

That campaign fix for unlocking Titans is huge. I know they wanted to encourage people to play the campaign for their story, but locking something like that behind it always seemed like a poor choice. Especially when getting a campaign game together could take 30 minutes.

Lot's of other stuff in here seems pretty cool too, glad they are still working on it.

The Titanfall campaign was, in general, a mis-step. It was handled badly in almost every way. I do kind of like the corporate level because there are so many spectres, and having a hardpoint match where holding a hardpoint also manufactures spectres is a cool idea, but they needed a lot more cool ideas like that to make it work. Good that they pulled the Ogre and Stryder out from behind that wall.

It's nice they're adding this content, but the game itself never felt right to me. The small amount of players accompanied with mandatory bots never sat well with me before release, and I hold that feeling after playing it. I actually sold the game because I found it to be pretty boring.

edit: not to mention the matchmaking terrible, but maybe the update fixed this

Man, on the one hand I'm really happy with a lot of the changes and additions here, but on the other I'm upset that the game didn't have a lot of these at launch. Its starting to make the release version look like a weird beta.

I don't think rebalancing and additions make the game look like a "weird beta." The game was not broken like Battlefield when it launched (the matchmaking had problems but Titanfall was definitely playable). This is just what vigorous support of a product post-launch looks like. It's common in the PC market and used to be more common. What's uncommon on console is not having to pay for it (There is paid DLC in the form of maps but the rest of this stuff is free.)

I loved Titanfall at launch and like many of the changes. I think Respawn deserves nothing but praise for continuing to support it like this. Most companies would wait until the next game to address issues like the size of your burncard deck or changing up game modes. Just compare Titanfall's support to that of Battlefield, let alone Batman "Leave it broken" Origins.

Woah there man, you are misinterpreting my statement there. There are CERTAIN things about this update that strike me as things that should have been in by default, namely a lot of the customization stuff and the ability to unlock the Strider and Ogre Titans without needting to play campaign. I play Titanfall on PC and am an avid PC gamer so its not like the concept of post-release support is alien to me. That being said, the game felt so bare to me on the initial release that a lot of this "post-release support" seems like it would have just been in the game if Titanfall had come out like 6 months later.

@president_barackbar:

Sure if they had more time they would likely have put in more stuff. You can say that for a lot of games that have content cut due to time and budget constraints. I just don't think that the issue you describe are issues that make it feel like a Beta, because in my mind betas have bugs and/or are only a portion of the overall game. You are talking about a few missing frills.

I do agree that Titanfall felt (feels) bare bones in some ways, but I actually don't think these changes fix that. I just like the gameplay more than that of other shooters so I'd rather have bare bones titanfall than fully featured CoD