Titanfall 2 and the Triumph of Character Over Plot
Michelle Ehrhardt
“Defend the Burger Town,” Sergeant Foley shouts at me for what feels like the fifth time. I’m about halfway through the the single-player campaign of 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and together, we’re trudging our way through a Russian-infested Washington D.C. The insistence in his voice is to be expected, as, like his namesake, the image he seems to have left on players over the years is him barking noise at the screen. “Ramirez, do this!” he commands. “Ramirez, do that!” Your relationship with this character is as quest giver and rat in maze, and nothing else. It’s as artificial a camaraderie as the situation he’s thrusting me into. Of all the bombastic set pieces in Modern Warfare 2, the defense of Burger Town is the one I remember most, if only for its ridiculous setting. It takes place in the middle of a mission called “Wolverines!”- a reference to the 1984 film Red Dawn, about a Russian invasion of suburban America—and sees the player character and his squad defending suburban D.C. from a Russian assault. The premise here is that you and your team get caught out in a strip mall while making your way to more strategic positions, but the defense of the restaurant is longer and more drawn out than that setup would imply. Looking at videos on YouTube, others have made it through the mission in maybe 10 minutes. For me, it was closer to 30 or 45. What was likely meant to be a quick stop in a refreshingly unusual setting for a military shooter instead became a thematically loaded siege scenario, with me treating a fast food restaurant—a bastion of American capitalism—as more worthy of defense than the White House. At the same time, there’s not much to do with the setting itself. No grease fires to start, or freezers to lock yourself into. In terms of player interaction with the game, Burger Town is just another set of walls to hide behind, and another excuse to give players a reason to shoot enemy troops. For all of Foley’s insistence, it’s just a fast food restaurant, and there’s no real sense that it matters or that it’s worth killing over. Fast forward to 2016, and the ex-Infinity Ward members who form Respawn Entertainment have created their first shooter campaign since releasing Modern Warfare 2 seven years ago: Titanfall 2. Still, even with the time they’ve had to update their approach to worldbuilding, the plot of the game isn’t much different from the situation described above. You play as rookie mech pilot and space frontiersman Jack Cooper as he defends his relatively rural home from a larger federation of mega corporations that now essentially controls Earth proper. The commentary on capitalism has flipped this time, but the emphasis on blue collar do-gooders and on the defense of rural areas from an overwhelming force is still present—what have changed are the game’s priorities. Towards the end of Titanfall 2’s fourth mission, “Into the Abyss,” the player finds herself in another siege scenario, similar to the defense of the Burger Town in Modern Warfare 2. Here, she is locked in a large dome filled with artificial greenery, reached after navigating a factory which is able to constantly and autonomously reconfigure its own shape and size. The dome is used as a training area for enemy soldiers, and as such, can also change its shape to fit the nature of the drill being run. Ground can be brought in and swapped out at will, as can a number of mock-ups of what seem to be residential homes, and different weapons caches can be placed around the area at the behest of the person behind the controls. Squads of troops can be introduced to the fight from a few swappable insertion areas, as can ultra-powerful robot soldiers called “Reapers.” It’s a war-game, designed to train soldiers to invade the homes of civilians. But unlike the Burger Town scenario, this fight embraces its artificiality: here, Titanfall 2 demonstrates that it knows it’s a game. At the same time, despite the increased care and interactivity put into this fantastical setting over Modern Warfare 2’s Burger Town (it is more than just another set of walls) it is not the chief focus of the encounter it hosts. Titanfall 2 centres even its most action-packed moments around the emotional back and forth between protagonist Jack Cooper and his self-aware mech, named BT. If “Defend the Burger Town” is the memorable line from Modern Warfare 2’s D.C section, the one which lingers after the training room mission in Titanfall 2 is “Cooper, are you all right?” The training room was clearly not intended to be survived by a lone soldier. However, I had an ace up my sleeve the enemy didn’t know about. About 40 minutes prior, they had separated me from my robot companion, BT, and so now assumed I was alone. However, just before I was thrust into the training mission, I had managed to rescue him from the enemy and re-establish radio contact. Physically, I was alone, but I had help they did not expect. Now it was up to BT to repay the favor and rescue me in turn. I had little issue dealing with the average troops, but the mech-killing Reapers, less so. Outnumbered and outgunned, I ended up replaying the encounter about five times before finding myself uncharacteristically frustrated on what would turn out to be my final run. I would have been prone to panic, if not for the comforting voice of BT which suddenly crackled through my earpiece. When he confirmed to have found “an opening” in the dome’s outer wall, I thought “thank God.” The fight dimmed in the background. Rather than being focused on the wider war at hand, or the good of my country, or the threat of the enemy force, or even on the absurd sci-fi setting surrounding me, all I cared about was getting out of there and to the friend who had kept me calm earlier in the battle. I eventually caught up to BT, and predictably the enemy that was a threat to us separately couldn’t stand up to us together for more than 10 seconds. We made our way out of the enemy factory, and towards greater goals, but at this moment, simply being alive and with BT felt like the real victory of the mission—whatever mega corporation plans we had foiled seemed irrelevant. When defending Modern Warfare 2’s Burger Town, my mind had been on the grand Hollywood blockbuster plot before me, and on trying to put together hazy details about ultra-nationalist plans from the game’s mission briefings. I didn’t care much for the soldiers surrounding me, and was distant from their well-being. My attention might have been on Burger Town and what it meant, symbolically, as part of suburban America. But why was I, an individual American soldier, supposed to care about a lone fast food place in light of an invasion? The narrative set up was detailed, but removed from my moment-to-moment action. By contrast, while Titanfall 2 has a similarly grand plot, its individual scenarios are focused elsewhere. There was no briefing screen ahead of the training room mission, no talk of patriotic ideals or loaded imagery of defending suburban commercial institutions from foreign attack. I wasn’t shouted at to defend a place I didn’t care about much. Instead I was spoken to by a partner concerned for my safety. Rather than defend a vague symbol of patriotism and American culture, the situation BT and I had just been through was focused on strengthening our personal bond. Foley, human as he was supposed to be, was, in practise, nothing but a laundry list of tasks. BT, on the other hand, was ally, victim, and eventually rescuer. Despite the more involved setting of the robotic factory, the focus here wasn’t on Tom Clancy-esque conspiracies, but the emotional growth that BT and I had undergone by both being thrown into danger and both repaying a life debt to each other. “If the plot we use to excuse shooting scenarios is going to be so artificial,” Titanfall 2 seems to say, “the answer is not to focus on the plot.” Like many of 2016’s shooters, the success here was one of character over plot. Instead of taking me out of the action of the fight by having me focus on the wider plans of the factions participating in it, Titanfall 2 acknowledged its artificiality, glossed over the larger war at hand, and focused its attention–like a buddy cop film–on the characters populating those scenarios. Like Overwatch or Doom, it had left narrative to the background and focused on in-the-moment character interactions instead. During a grand-scale action film, it’s easy to maintain attention on sweeping, swashbuckling battles and the themes they evoke. Even during action scenes, you aren’t the one participating in them, and so you don’t need to spend mental energy on surviving them. In a game, however, moments spent thinking about foreign invasions or communism vs. capitalism can distract you from play and cause a “game over.” Your attention, as an active participant, is more likely on both your allies fighting alongside you, and the enemies fighting against you. However, in Titanfall predecessor Call of Duty, Hollywood style storytelling was almost always put at the center, whether through the Saving Private Ryan-style Normandy invasions of the early games, or the Red Dawn East vs. West political jockeying of the Modern Warfare series. Here, interpersonal drama took a backseat to plot, and as the team tried its best to ape another medium’s successes, it failed to acknowledge the personal interaction that more clearly suited the storytelling format they’d chosen. Titanfall 2 has no such Hollywood pretensions. Yes, there are grand armies. Yes, there’s a superweapon. But the game spends maybe a grand total of 10 minutes laying out these topics. Instead, most of your time is spent either talking to BT, or exchanging Gundam-style patter with enemy pilots. Even your dialogue choices are smaller and humbler, not serving to affect how the game plays out or to put the player into moral dilemmas, but instead define what kind of friend you’re going to be to BT. For all its explosions, it’s a much smaller story. Titanfall 2 has dropped all pretensions about what it is and is not, has realized the unbelievability and camp of its spiritual predecessor, and has decided to play to its strengths instead, moving the player’s attention away from weighty national conflicts that are ultimately ridiculous, unmemorable, and contrived setups for shooting, and to a surprisingly sweet, genuine relationship. It presents a way of telling a Call of Duty-style story with both heart and humility, two words that I never would have thought I’d be applying to a series such as this. Titanfall 2 understands that the Burger Town doesn’t matter: it’s the people defending it who should be in the spotlight, and who are the ones worth fighting for.

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Michelle Ehrhardt is a critic and reporter living in New York City. You can find her work at Kill Screen, Out, and The Atlantic, and follow her on Twitter at @chelleehrhardt.