Quick Look: Titanfall (360)

Brad,It did sound like an South African accent. Afrikaans, it's pronounced more like Afri-Khans. Like Star Trek 'Khan'. It's one of the languages spoken in South Africa, English being another. The accent is more universal and not unique to people who speak Afrikaans. Source: My dad is South African.

Maybe you should watch the other quick looks of Titanfall then? That is what this quick look is about. To see how the game runs and looks on 360.

Titanfall's been taking up all my freetime recently, and this seems like a totally fine version. Definitely recommend picking it up :D

Hey guys it looks like the game plays fine on the 360 and plays fine on the Xbox One and plays fine on PC and everyone with those various gaming systems can play whichever version they like and it will play just fine! COME AT ME BROS!

@vinny@drewbert What is wrong with the video? There is a weird flickering and it is especially obvious in the menus. I noticed the same thing on a Dark Souls 2 video before when you were in a spider web room.

This is why I like GB, on gamespot, they just talked about that it looked good, here, Vinny and Brad are expressing what´s really on their mind, good work!

I played maybe an hour of Titanfall on my XBone. Too wrapped up in Demons Souls 2/Diablo 3/Second Son. Mostly Diablo 3

Shitty bitrate and/or encoding.

Yes, but do the sconces project shadows? I have to know!

Looks like ass. Then again, I think pretty much all version of this game look like ass visually so it makes sense.

I also think that Vinny is underestimating how good 360 and PS3 games looked. There are still many that still stand up even now.

Did I miss the release announcement? Seems odd to just drop it into stores.

EDIT: I guess I was just so used to them delaying it, I didn't realize that they stuck to a release date.

Am I the only one that finds it rage inducing when Brad drives a quick look?

I don't know. The difference between this and Xbox One isn't very dramatic. There's more pop in but a lot of the textures on Bone and PC are pretty muddy too. The insides of titans always looked like shit and I don't see any significant difference here with the building textures.

The difference looks pretty miniscule viewed from a video player, maybe there'd be more impact if I were looking at the actual thing.

The art design is what makes Titanfall look cool but across the board (PC, Bone, 360) it's not a very good looking game.

Honestly I think I'd have preferred for them to reduce textures to a horrible smeared mess in order to getting it running at 60fps.

Coming from the original makers of COD, I'm really surprised that wasn't their number one priority when porting it over to the 360.

Ah well, I'm moaning for the sake it really. I wont be buying or playing this either way. It seems more entertaining than most multiplayer shooters, but all in all, they really aren't my bag.

I agree with Vinny, this does look worse than the majority of last gen titles.

Quick tip: wall run all the time. It's a quicker way to get anywhere. Wall run + bunny hops to travel at high speed.

@tehpickle: I don't think Respawn had anything to do with this 360 port.

Holy shit the textures in this version are atrocious

That compression is nasty, text looks like a blotchy unreadable mess. The killfeed looks censored most of the time. The loading screen is all flickery with whatchamacallits. It's not just the loading screen, I'm noticing now. Seriously makes it look like an old VHS tape. Did something go awry with this one or did my GPU driver catch a virus?

Either way I'm fairly positive the actual game looks noticeably better than what I'm seeing in this video.

Good thing they don't do 1080p with a low bitrate, because that would look too compressed right? Its odd to have trouble with 720p these days since its pretty much ancient technology by computer standards. Methinks they use easy/fast/cheap 720 compression so computers like MacBook Airs can playback the video smoothly.

As far as the game proper, I think it looks fine. It looks very much like console Call of Duty and only runs a little worse. If someone didn't buy/put together a PC for 30 more fps and double the resolution years ago I can't see people paying $500 (or like $390 for that bundle) for about 10 more fps and a handful of resolution lines.

In ideal circumstances this is true, but when you're dealing with bad ports like the first Dark Souls it becomes much more fiddly than using the 360 controller.

@aska said:

As yes, you're absolutely right. A company called Bluepoint, apparently. Apologies for my mistake.

Still, it looks like ass when compared to a whole boatload of other 360 games, sadly.

I think the GB crew (particularly Vinny in this case) can be tediously picky when it comes to graphics. I think Brad touched on it in the video but graphics only go so far and once you get hooked into the game, it's not what you are thinking about. If the Xbox 360 version offers a gameplay experience that's close to the others, and it looks like it does, then that's what matters.

EA published this game, not Microsoft. Much more likely that it was delayed the extra few weeks, so it would be delayed into Q2 (and thus count towards EA's Q2 results)

I think this version of the game looks fine - textures are worse, and the framerate is more inconsistent, but I think Drew had it spot-on. If we hadn't already seen the XBONE and PC versions of this game, this would look fine.

Yeah this looks like dogshit next to the One and PC versions. People be crazy if they think it doesn't.

I don't know why but I have zero inclination to get an XBOX One. In fact the best gaming experience I've had lately is a PS3 remake of a PS2 game (FFX HD). I think that says it all. Shiny new graphics is nice but I don't care unless they make games I want to play.

Aha, wasn't aware Dark Souls gave that much trouble with the controller, have not played it since I got the Dualshock 4. I have been testing it out with a bunch of games and seem to work fine with most, Wolf Among is is one of those where it doesn't seem to work for some reason.

I don't comprehend how it can be more fiddly, its literally is like using 360 (games see the controller as a 360 controller) plus with the touch pad being able manipulate the mouse without setting down the controller is so great.

Just push the PS button twice (once to connect to PC and 2nd to pop up big picture mode) and my laptop becomes mid-range portable gaming machine

This video was ridiculously compressed on all quality settings, kinda weird.

I didn't think the Xone and PC versions of this looked great, and other than some missing lighting - most noticeably on the player's gun model - I think this looks pretty close. Sure, there are lower res textures than on the other versions, but the other versions also didn't have particularly high quality textures for something supposed to run in 1080p.

When it comes to the framerate stuff I prefer a consistent low framerate over a wildly varying one that goes from 20 to 140 depending on where you look. That said, the higher you can keep the stable framerate, the better, of course.

I dunno I think there's a fair amount of here that just looks kind of rough on its own. Knowledge of those versions makes it way more apparent but the lack of such doesn't suddenly make any of this look particularly good.

The 360 version runs fine. Obviously inferior to the PC and Xbox One versions, but for someone like me who can only play this on 360, it's a totally competent version of the game.

I'm honestly surprised people want to play games like Titanfall on PC with a controller competitively. Puts you at a disadvantage against mouses. But hey, I bet it's way more comfortable :)

I agree. I think people can be way too picky when it comes to the technical aspects of games. This version of the game is playable, it doesn't look spectacular, but it's playable, and that's what really matters to me.

I'm not someone who notices graphics or framerate, but I was surprised how much worse this looks than the Xbone version.

@kmg90: The DS4 has issues with Dark Souls because it detects the DirectInput from the DS4 AND the Xinput wrapper. It took me a bit of fiddling to get it to work properly with Dark Souls. The 360 controller is much easier, but I still wouldn't say the DS4 is difficult. It's not a proper plug and play experience though.

The video quality does not necessarily help the game's case.

True, but the thing that probably bothers me the most is the numerous parts where there are suddenly no loaded textures.

Video quality on this site is bad yeah, does not seem to bother them to make it any better tho.

@brad: The 'hide' controller option seemed to resolve all those problems for me with DS4tool. I need to have steam shut down when first booting DS4tool but after that works like a dream.

Think there were some updates to help deal with the specific problems with Dark Souls in the past though. I definitely played the whole of Dark Souls on the new dual shock though... bliss :)

I've been really enjoying how Brad and Vinny have been holding it down over the past few quick looks. They've been pretty great. Just felt like mentioning that.

@whitegreyblack: Actually, according to Sucker Punch the PS3 would not be able to stream in the city fast enough to even make a really bad looking version of Second Son possible. They were able to do Second Son because the PS4 let them store a ton of stuff in the RAM. On Titanfall you see the issue with texture streaming but the objects still fit in the RAM so it is possible to do the game. In Second Son it just wouldn't work. They would have had to cut most of the movement powers which would have changed the entire balance of the game as without those powers you couldn't escape quickly enough from powerful enemies. They did a lengthy video explaining it all. Don't remember where but it was pretty interesting.

@raven10: That's interesting info, thanks.

I'm still going to wait to see what truly outstanding stuff comes to the new generation of hardware before considering a purchase, though ;–)

Wait. Am I totally insane or did the game look markedly better with the locked framerate?

Game looks fine to me. I have no plans to shell out $500 for a decent pc or a XBO so I can deal with this version.

@vod_crack said:

I just think there's a lot of confirmation bias at work sometimes when it comes to certain games from PC folks.

I don't disagree with Vinny or Brad at all in this case, though. This game definitely looks crappy, in some spots more than others, but on the original "Hold my calls, I'm playing Titanfall" stream the reaction to seeing the PC version from Vinny in contrast to the Xbox One version was hyperbolic considering the documented differences from Digital Foundry on the game's release. Graphically the only real difference is the resolution; asset quality wise there's not really much of a difference.

I'm not even much of a fan of Microsoft, nor do I have any interest in buying an Xbox One right now, but I dunno. I think spoiled is the appropriate term. Vinny has become most comfortable playing PC games that whenever he looks at one, he assumes they are leagues above their console counterparts. With a lot of games recently, they've been pretty much comparable. It's not like it was a few years ago.

Recently on Gaf there was a thread featuring what were claimed to be environmental and lighting effects in PC version of Watch Dogs. They looked very, very nice, and the thread exploded into the usual PC circle jerk of everyone going "lolconsoles, no way the consoles can handle this awesome sauce." Later it was revealed to be Ps4 footage, and there was some sort of mistranslation or misunderstanding. I feel like that incident was a really good social experiment on how much PC games can be overestimated in graphical quality to the average human eye just by telling you it's the PC version. It was confirmation bias in action. And hilarious, in retrospect.

Considering the Xbox One is something like ten-plus times more powerful than the 360, this is pretty great looking. I'm actually surprised the Xbox One version doesn't look even better.

That sounds like Brad Shumacher from Gamespoot.

Since when does Giant Bomb do quick looks of UT2K4 mods?

I like how people still say things like this, like resolution is just some minor, unimportant factor. A low resolution makes ALL the assets, everything on-screen look crappier. It can take a beautiful game and make it look like pixelated junk. Now, the difference between 1080p and whatever 792p (which is a bit disingenuous sounding as it's 1408x792, which is about half the pixel count of 1920x1080) isn't enough to make it look like total shit, but it is absolutely a huge and immediately noticeable difference.

That, combined with a lower framerate, and it's easy to see why Vinny is "picky," because you go from essentially twice the resolution and a far higher and more stable framerate to something that looks AND runs worse, notably so, not just some minor thing you have to squint to see.