I finally did this Saturday night:

(basically it means I'm Generation 10, Level 50, which is the current max level in Titanfall)

I've never "maxed out" in a first-person shooter with levels before and decided early on that I'd try to do that in Titanfall. It took me three and a half months and a little over 200 hours of game time to max out. Here's what my (unimpressive) stats look like at the end of it all:

Gallery

I'm pretty bad at shooters but after three months of playing I would say I've improved to "okay". I'm occasionally dominant against new players, but against people with similar experience I mostly just hold my own. I find the essential ingredient to getting good at something is to enjoy being bad at it, and I love a good shooter even when I'm not playing so hot.

Playing Titanfall for three months has also, oddly, given me slightly better reflexes in real life, though probably just temporarily. A month ago I opened a cabinet and a container fell out. I immediately caught it with both hands. Normally I'd just smear my body up against the counter and hope nothing breakable hit the floor. In the game I occasionally twitch-shotgun people so fast I don't even really know what I'm doing. It's cool but also a little weird.

The game itself is great. The mobility of your character is absolutely intoxicating. I'm actually a little worried it will ruin me. (I want to enjoy Destiny in the fall!) The titans feel powerful but are still as squishy as you'd want. The levels are fascinating and complex and fun to play and I enjoy them all. Last night, I stumbled into a hallway in Nexus that I'd never seen before, which after ten or fifteen hours on that map is pretty amazing and pretty cool.

Built around the game (and this is how you spend 200 hours playing it) is a regeneration system that requires you to gain experience and complete challenges to "regenerate" to the next generation and start again at level 1. Regenerating doesn't do anything for your character but it gives you something to do. Each generation has specific challenges associated with it, and those challenges become harder and more numerous the higher the generation.

The challenges give you a tour through the weapons in the game ("Kill 75 players with the shotgun"), tactics ("Get 25 execution kills in the Atlas"), as well as general proficiency ("Win 100 games").

Most of the challenges are great because they introduce you to weapons and tactics that you come to love but would not have tried otherwise. Titan executions were a little intimidating (until I'd had to do 25 of them in each chassis) and now I love them, and after using all the guns I found a few unexpected ones that I really enjoy.

A few of the challenges, unfortunately, introduce you to weapons and tactics that you will avoid like the plague thereafter. The worst challenges, for me, were so difficult that I'd essentially be ignoring the game objectives trying to progress and my team would be losing because of my distraction and it would be awful. The three worst challenges that stick out were the two sniper rifle challenges (sniper rifles are not a good idea in any of the retail game modes) and one challenge that had you get 75 kills by dropping your titan on players/titans/NPCs. (Spoiler: aiming titanfalls sucks, suitable enemies are never on hand when your titan is ready to drop so you have to run across the map to find one, and then when you get there those enemies are CONSTANTLY MOVING while your titanfall has a five-second drop timer.)

That dropping challenge, to me, is easiest the most idiotic part of the game. It teaches you nothing except that even the talented developers at Respawn occasionally make catastrophic mistakes.

Good news though, that. BEFORE last week the most idiotic part of the game was the matchmaking. Matchmaking was only used to place you on a team and then, if a team won three matches in a row, to find another team. Teams would not be rebalanced in between games and this not only could make the game very frustrating -- it would make nearly every game frustrating! Matchmaking was just patched last week and it's still not perfect but it is now perfectly acceptable.

Overall though, I really like the game and the regeneration system. I have seen a lot of common critiques of the game. I thought I'd address a few and why they don't bother me personally.

1) Nobody's playing on PC!

I don't know where these people are playing or when they are playing or what their standards are. I've been playing PC shooters for a long time and finding a suitable match can be a huge pain in any game. I certainly had nights back in the day in Natural Selection or TF2 or BF:BC2 where my favorite servers would be down or empty and I'd spend the whole night trying to find one game to play and never succeed. I'd literally spend over an hour trying to play and never get in, or only get to play for a little while and then have to find a new server.

Nothing like that has ever happened to me in Titanfall. Maybe a handful of times I didn't get to play my favorite mode, but in general I spend less time passively waiting for games in Titanfall than I did actively looking for games in other PC shooters I've played.

Maybe these people are in other server regions that are more sparsely populated? Maybe in a world of CoD (which I've never got around to playing) people have higher expectations? I don't know. But I have been satisfied with my PC experience.

2) You don't get a lot of content for $60

This is understandable, though at 200+ hours I personally got my money's worth. Despite that, I'll complain a little anyway : the campaign is minimal, there is no horde or PvE, and I would love to see some sort of "assault" mode.

The lack of content was understandable this time, but I absolutely expect more from the sequel.

3) There aren't enough maps/weapons/etc.

When I played Battlefield : Bad Company 2, there were maybe forty or fifty weapons. Most of them I used as little as possible. I think the weapon variety in Titanfall among the ten weapons is fine. They could have trimmed out the two sniper rifles and the game would have been improved!

The fifteen maps (eighteen now) are all medium-sized and wonderfully detailed, and designed with the movement mechanics in mind. Again, I haven't played many modern shooters, but I think the map variety compares very well with other shooters I've played.

Anyway, this is my farewell post to Titanfall. I enjoyed my time with the game and it's time to move on. Having this much fun with a shooter again gives me great hope for Destiny in the fall, and of course Titanfall 2.

I recently hit max rank as well. As you said, the way the regeneration system worked meant I kept trying new stuff out so this was my first FPS where I hit max rank as well. I agree with most of your points. It's a game with a lot of depth that isn't apparent on the surface. It's nice to see a more positive post about Titanfall on this board.

To add to your points, this is the first FPS for me where every map is a winner. There is a good variety in the maps but none of them are frustratingly small such as Rust of MW2 or stupidly big.

I disagree with your point about the snipers though. I found the first one a lot of fun and the second one was built with parkour in mind. The Titan drop challenge was bullshit though.

I've played about 20 hours and I am in Gen 2. I feel like I've got my monies worth, I normally don't like online games so I feel like regenning was a good sign for both me and this game.

Wow, congratulations, man! I've been playing it for a week now and just hit rank 43. Absolutely love this game.

As to your comment about the game lacking content: I think once Titanfall 2 releases (inevitably), if there isn't a ton of content, I don't think the original should be forgiven. It's basically a premiere title for a new system, so its understandable that it isn't loaded, but its sequel better at least match the games its up against.

All that said, though, even with my relatively short amount of time playing it, I think the game is worth $60. I, however, go by the rule that if you're willing to pay $60, than its worth $60. If you're not, it isn't. You know, the whole idea that a product is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. I mean, hell, some guy made a million dollars selling rocks on eBay.

I think the mobility and speed of your character kinda makes what map you're playing on irrelevant, and that's why it's hard to find a fault with any of them. When the DLC came out I couldn't stand the Jungle map at all, but after playing it over and over I realized that it's just as well designed as any of the others. If I had to pick one I absolutely adore it would be Lagoon.

I'm still hanging around Gen 5. I haven't played it as much in the last few weeks, but I need to get the Gooser and Arc Cannon kills. I've only ever accidently gotten Gooser's. I have no idea how unfun that challenge must have been before they patched it.

Congrats!

I don't know how I should feel but... I played the beta for the game for like 4 hours. Thought it was fun. Bought the game with the season pass or whatever it was... Booted it up once and that was it. Played like a half hour of it or something, then turned it off...

Just started playing the game about a week ago and it's really difficult to know what to think of the game. The content does feel really lacking, the campaign is a joke, short range weapons feel kind of useless, and the connection isn't always great. That being said the game is still really fun, the movement is a game changer, and Titans are fun to pilot and to take down.

It still feels too shallow, like a demonstration of some core ideas for a better, future fully fleshed out product. If they got a little more creative and really went for the game could be amazing.

It was really tough to get Goosers. I ran with the XO-16 on all my titans until I got all five kills, and it still took me until level 40-something to do that. You're right, I have no idea how people ever got 50 -- in 200 hours I got 16 total.

I keep forgetting there is even a PC version of this game. It's already down to $29 from $59...probably a pretty good sign no one is really playing it. Not surprising given the huge variety of multiplayer shooters available on PC, many of them being free to play.

A major problem with the PC version is what MB mentions: Microsoft went out of their way to make sure everyone knew it was EXCLUSIVELY on the XBox One. And that other platform they mentioned as an afterthought sold exclusively on that other digital store that isn't GoG.

And as a side note: Even on older less popular games like Left 4 Dead 2 it is relatively easy to find a game due to modern distributed server systems. Finding a match is just a click on the Quick Match button and that doesn't mean anything with popularity. Truly popular games have a lot of servers configured with many modes with many different settings. If one is hitting Quick Match and getting dumped into the same map and mode over and over and over again then there is an issue with player pop being so low it can't support more than a few modes.

Can't wait to play Titanfall 2.

@boatorious: Your stats don't look terrible. Average 4.0 KDR and MVPing in nearly 1/4 of all your games seem like pretty decent stats.

The hour or two of titanfall I played before I got bored with the free weekend was 25% waiting to find a game, 5% navigating the crappy menu, and the rest running on walls and stuff.

Regarding the max level thing, I managed to 'prestige' black ops 2 over a free weekend and hey I've never tried to do that again. Hah. It's good that it took you a while cause then you don't get sick of the game like I did.

That 4.0 K/D includes bots, his player vs. player K/D is 1.2, which is still above average.

I had a good time with Titanfall for about a week and change. The AI-controlled enemies were just a constant bummer to me, because the sort of integrated PvP/PvE experience they were touting sounded great. I'd be lying if I said that was the reason though, I just didn't love it enough to stick with it.