How Titanfall 2’s Best Level Was Made – Kotaku Australia

Titanfall 2s single player campaign is still fantastic, with the time-bending Effect and Cause mission the absolute highlight. Weve gone into detail about how good it is before, and todays theres commentary from a senior Respawn designer on how the magic happened.
This story has been retimed following the resurgence of interest in Titanfall 2, with its recent re-release on Steam.
Jake Keating is a senior designer at Respawn, having worked on the scripting, writing, environments, AI, systems and mechanics for Titanfall and Titanfall 2. He recently sat down with the Australian YouTube channel Game Brain, explaining the teams outlook when they started on Titanfall 2 and how they approached the idea of a campaign.
One of the tools Respawn built early on was action blocks, which was little prototypes that Respawn designers would use in the early stages. Keating also described the amount of time Respawn had to spend building Effect and Cause, primarily because it was largely two maps running concurrently.
The lecture hall is a perfect example, Keating said. You go in there, you dont even have any weapons, theres nothing to shoot at, and its just exposition. It changes from a pristine state back to the present state where its overgrown youve got every department working on that level, that one scene, and its over in three seconds.
Its a fascinating reveal of the amount of detail that goes into things players often dont see or dont see for very long, and therefore dont consider especially important. But it helps reveal some of the tricks and management needed for good development, like reusing geometry, or level planning that doesnt create more work than is necessary.
Effect and Cause broke all of those rules, and that was before any of the cool stuff actually happened. And thats the life of video games sometimes: creating something truly memorable often takes time and an exceptional amount of effort.
The Game Brain channel has a ton of other great videos too, including a breakdown of the lightsaber battles in Jedi Academy, and you can check them all out here.

Click here to view the original article.