Titanfall 2: The Perfect Tutorial

An in-game tutorial that lasted six hours long turned out to be the best of its kind.

Every video game in existence must have a tutorial. How are you supposed to play a game if you don’t know how to play it in the first place?

It is also no secret that some video games did their tutorial sections better than others. They were immersive without being ambiguous and informative without being intrusive. They did their jobs well, and when the button prompts start to disappear, players were able to play the games on their own like a toddler finally being able to walk on their two legs.

Not every game benefited from the same tutorial treatment. Multiplayer FPS games in this case need to have an involved tutorial system that not only teaches the players the fundamentals such as sprinting or aiming down sight, but also the games’ various intrigues that can only be found in the PvP environment. For instance, Rainbow Six: Siege players would benefit from being taught how to lean and place their crosshairs.

For Titanfall 2, there’s a lot to pay attention to. You have an advanced movement mechanic, an overpowered arsenal of weapons and gadgets, as well as a 28-ton mech called Titans at your disposal superimposed against a chaotic battlefield where your main enemies are either flying across the map or piloting a 7-meter tall robot similar to yours. How are you supposed to keep up?

Fortunately for new players, Titanfall 2 has a 6-hour long tutorial section perfect for familiarizing players with how the game works. That’s right, it’s the single-player campaign.

Superb story presentation aside, Titanfall 2’s campaign managed to teach players how the multiplayer work — minus the inherent human element. It didn’t go for the tedious ‘capture this flag’ or ‘hold this objective’ route. Instead, it presents players with different elements in a combat situation they might encounter during their multiplayer experience, which trains them to make decisions accordingly.

Let’s start with The Pilot’s Gauntlet, the tutorial level at the beginning of the game. Short, sweet, and representative of the game, though not in the same vein as The Pit from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2; instead of introducing the game’s shooting mechanics, The Gauntlet familiarizes players with the advanced movement system with aspects such as wall-running, sliding, and double-jumping. The static targets, while unlike the always-moving enemy NPCs and human players, made for good accuracy practice. After all, you’re only supposed to hit them once; none of the enemies die in one hit.

Then comes protagonist Jack Cooper’s encounter with BT-7274, the deuteragonist Titan of the campaign. This is where the game teaches players how to pilot a Titan. And not just BT the Titan, but all kinds of Titans available in the multiplayer. Throughout the story, players can pick up Titan loadouts belonging to other Titan classes that BT will adopt if selected. These loadouts does not undergo any changes whatsoever from their multiplayer counterparts.

The way these loadouts are placed directly on the players’ path instead of being hidden like collectibles can only mean that the developers are encouraging players to test and play with the Titan loadouts in order to find out which class suits them best. Speaking from experience, I found Tone to be the most powerful, which mirrored the multiplayer reality that the Tone Titan class is overpowered. This is the aspect that the campaign nailed, the tutorial on how to pilot any Titan.

Of course, the Titan-piloting tutorial wouldn’t be complete without touching on the other side of the gun: enemy Titans. That’s where the campaign’s boss battles come in: they teach players Titan match-ups. What’s good about these boss battles is that they never one-on-one battles. During these battles, players will have to contest with enemy grunt units, droids, and even other Titans in addition to the main boss Titan, which are almost always based on the multiplayer Titan classes.

Again, this mirrors the multiplayer scene well: it’s never going to be a fair fight on the field. When engaging an enemy Titan in multiplayer, players must take into account enemy minion units, friendly players, enemy players on foot, and other enemy Titans piloted by enemy players. Hectic is an understatement when it comes to a Titan skirmish in multiplayer, and the boss fights in the campaign did a good job of giving players a taste on how chaotic multiplayer matches can become.

Speaking of minion units, Titanfall 2’s campaign has plenty of those to go around. Similar to creep units in MOBA titles like DotA 2 and League of Legends, Titanfall 2’s multiplayer feature NPCs on either sides that fight alongside players. They are relatively easy to beat, but can prove troublesome to untrained players thinking they are free kills — especially the armored Stalkers and bulky Reapers.

Again, the campaign teaches players on how to properly engage these minion units. Grunt units are best engaged with the element of surprise, Stalkers should be engaged from a good distance, and Reapers stand little chance against players in Titans — or explosive and anti-Titan weapons if players are on foot. Each of these minion units are introduced gradually in the campaign, which allows player time to form separate strategies. Also, props to the campaign for training players on how to deal with Ticks in a section where I died four times: never let them get too close.

Then there’s that mentality, that mindset all pilots should have. Be quick, be nimble, but most importantly, be deadly. All campaign missions present players with unique scenarios that reinforce the importance of staying on their feet. If The Pilot’s Gauntlet has the fundamentals, then the rest of the campaign has the exercises and the drills. From the landscape continuously flipping upside down in Ash’s facility to the unpredictable time-jumping mission, players indirectly underwent a rigorous regime in honing their skills and reflexes as a pilot. They are the true equalizers of the Frontier, and they should act like it.

However, a pilot wouldn’t be complete without his Titan, and the campaign has that front covered as well. Cooper’s bond with BT is considered a highlight of the campaign, a lesson that players can pick up on: trust your Titan, and it will trust you in return. The importance of a pilot’s bond with their Titan is translated into the multiplayer, where players’ knowledge of their Titans’ limits is paramount to winning a match. After all, a Titan is only as good as the pilot inside it.

Last but not least, how to extract. It’s worth noting that in some multiplayer modes, the match doesn’t immediately end after a winner is determined. There is a short period of time for the losing team to get to their dropship and extract out of the map before getting completely wiped out by the winning team — with no respawns.

A similar scenario happened at the end of the campaign: Cooper had won, but the entire planet around him had imploded and he needed a way out — fast. So how did the developers direct players to Cooper’s arriving extraction? By using the same icon used to indicate players of the dropship’s position in the multiplayer. I believe this to be a brilliant design choice, as players jumping into multiplayer from the campaign will be able to immediately associate the icon with the act of ‘getting the hell out of here’. Players will know exactly what that icon means, thanks to the single-player campaign.

And as if all that wasn’t enough? After successfully extracting from the planet destruction in the final mission, i.e. finishing the campaign, players will get an achievement called “The Real Pilot’s Gauntlet”.

That’s right, the game acknowledges that the campaign itself is the true Pilot’s Gauntlet. In other words, the campaign is the tutorial to the game itself the same way as the Pilot’s Gauntlet serves as the tutorial for aspiring pilots in the Titanfall universe.

6 hours may sound like a lot of time for a tutorial, but with such superb presentation? Definitely worth the effort.