OXMUK
Titanfall! It's like Gundam, only with more ironsights and less preposterous anime histroinics. Respawn's community manager Abbie Heppe has shed a little - just a little - more light on the Xbox exclusive via MK Gaming. The biggest takeaway is that there are several different types of mech beyond the vanilla variety shown at E3. Could we be talking animalistic mechs, Heppe? Spider mechs, perhaps?
The game also supports a progression system, but Heppe was unable to say anything further on this front, and there will be several playable infantry characters, which could correspond to multiple classes.
As I wrote in our debut preview, Titanfalls can be summoned from orbit during matches at timed intervals. "You can decrease the amount of time it takes to call in a Titan by completing objectives and getting kills," Heppe explained. Sort of like killstreaks, then. "Once you lose your Titan the countdown starts again. It is possible that everyone in the match could have a Titan on the battlefield at the same time." Freaky.
The game's two-tier playstyle has obliged a cunning approach to map design. "We have to have maps that support not only the Titans which are over 20 feet tall but also human-sized Pilots, so even our "smaller" maps are pretty large comparatively. What's cool is each map has areas for Titans and areas for Pilots, so you get these smaller maps built into the larger ones and all these cool pathways through them."
That's pretty much it. You may be interested in reading about how Titanfall uses the Xbox One cloud - principally, it offloads AI work to the cloud in order to field vast armies of semi-autonomous, computerised troops, who fulfil a function similar to the creeps in a MOBA.
http://www.oxm.co.uk/58827/xbox-ones-titanfall-has-character-progression-multiple-mech-classes/
