The first game had strongly positive impressions of the movement and combat in multiplayer. Most criticisms about the first game were about the lack of a campaign, low player counts, and the lack of enough customization to keep the multiplayer fresh as you leveled up. So looking at how Respawn chose to address of those criticisms:
They addressed one concern by adding in a campaign, seems like a good call, its fun so far. Looking forward to getting to some of the crazy stuff Jeff and other reviewers have mentioned.
As far as player counts go most modes are still 6v6 if they have pilots and titans in them, but they removed the AI opponents from all but 2 of the modes. This leaves maps in those modes feeling incredibly empty. Like, "oh man it sucks this cool PC only shooter doesn't have enough of a player base to fill a server" empty. I cant for the life of me imagine how they came to this decision. The AI opponents always felt like a stop gap to give players something to shoot when they weren't running into other humans frequently enough, but they were better than nothing.
Finally, customization. I haven't counted but there certainly seem to be a handful more weapons in the sequel. But other customization actually feels more limited than the original. You can slap a lot more paint schemes on your Titan, but other than that it's a massive step back in this department. You're stuck with 6 choices of titans, they choose the combination of size of the Titan, its primary weapon, secondary weapon, utility ability, etc etc. If you find a Titan that fits your play style you may be fine on this front (sounds like Jeff did), but I haven't found one that's anything like any of the Titan loadouts I created and enjoyed in the first game. I loved that the first game let you make your own decisions. If you picked a light Titan you weren't locked into a play style. You could make a light "sniper" type of titan that runs around the outer edges of the battle flanking people, or you could slap short range weapons on it if you were confident you could get in, hit your enemy hard, and use your mobility to escape. Being locked into 6 defaults just feels shitty. Imagine having to play any Call of Duty with one of the handful of preset weapon load outs. Most people I know are counting down the minutes in each of those games until level 4 or whenever custom loadouts are unlocked. Totally bizarre design choice by Respawn imo, but it at least feels fixable by adding custom loadouts back in after a certain level.
They also made some changes to the much praised combat that feel like "change for the sake of change". The removal of Titan shields feels like it really messed up the balance. I can understand why Jeff likes it, he said he used Titans pretty disposably in the first game and now you don't have much choice. I much prefer the recharging shield allowing for longer battles and attempted retreats, in my view the battery system should have been a separate mode to change things up. Also, while the mobility is still great, the maps don't feel like they exploit them nearly as well as the original. In the first I felt like I constantly stumbled into opportunities to chain moves together because of how well designed the levels were. I've been actively looking for cool areas to use the mobility in TF2 and have come up pretty empty so far. Oh, and the change from awesome 1st person animations of you getting grabbed by your titan and shoved inside to less awesome 3rd person animations just makes me sad. So yeah as I write it all out, it's a surprising disappointment for me personally. Hope they make changes.
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