What Is Titanfall, and Why Are So Many People So Excited About It?

AUSTIN — You hold down a button on your video game controller and then tilt your character’s head up to the sky. An enormous humanoid robot comes screaming down toward you from the heavens, summoned by your command. When the robot lands, you press down another button to hop in and control the robot’s arms, legs and firearms. Your controller buzzes as explosions and gunfire sound around you, and then you begin stalking around, searching out your enemies, shaking the earth as you walk.

This is the central, vital moment of Titanfall, a new game for the Xbox One and PC that was released Tuesday night. Titanfall is one of the most anticipated video games of the past several years. Microsoft executives hope it will boost the sales of its Xbox One console, released in November 2013, in its battle against Sony’s PlayStation 4.

In the months leading to its release Tuesday, Titanfall has received the hype generally reserved for games like Grand Theft Auto V or The Sims 2, titles that are part of an established series with devoted fans.

Titanfall, however, is brand new. It was shown off at the E3 gaming conference in the summer of 2013, but very few people outside of gaming journalists and superfans have actually gotten to play it. So what is it about Titanfall that has everyone — from Microsoft’s finance guys to video game addicts to skeptical gamer writers — so dang excited?

A pilot and his Titan.

Part of the appeal, no doubt, is its pedigree. The game was created by Vince Zampella and his team at Respawn Games, which created the enormous mega-hit Call of Duty for Activision. Similar to the way you might follow a musician or a film director and anticipate each of his releases, so too does Zampella excite his fans.

In an interview Tuesday at the South by Southwest festival, at a festive launch party for Titanfall, Zampella wore the tired look of a man who had just worked on a project without stopping for the past two and a half years. He demurred when I asked him why people were so excited.

“We’re coming out at a time when there’s not a ton of other titles” for the just-released Xbox One, he told Yahoo Tech. “We’re something that people find to be new and unique. It’s got giant robots. It’s that combination that works really well together.”

It’s certainly more than just giant robots, though. Indeed, anyone can — and many have — created crappy, largely ignored games with giant robots. Respawn’s Titanfall excels in the way it uses those giant robots. In Titanfall, you can switch between human and human-controlled 50-foot robot, or “Titan.” The interactions between Titans and humans on the battlefield is excellent. There’s the awesome moment when you call on your Titan and it rockets down from on high (hence the game’s title). The rapid, cartoonish, robot-on-robot violence is immensely satisfying and addicting. Taking down a villainous titan with your guns and grenades, and watching someone else’s Titan explode, thrills every time. It provides the kind of transformative, instant-superhero experience you hope for in this kind of video game.

Titanfall also seems like an incredibly modern game — not just for its wowza graphics and up-to-the-minute references to Halo, Pacific Rim, Call of Duty and a litany of past works of violent art, but because it embraces the Internet in a way that no console game before it has. There’s no single-player mode in Titanfall: You can play only with other people, connected via the Xbox One’s Internet connection.

This is symptomatic of a growing trend, shifting the act of playing video games from a solitary activity, done in a vacuum, to one that takes place with a lot of other people. Titanfall takes this trend to an extreme, cutting out solitary play altogether. You can either join a team with friends on Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, or you can be randomly matched with other people who are playing simultaneously. There’s a “campaign mode,” a style of play that will be familiar to gamers old and young, in which a character embarks on a quest and must defeat different levels or missions to progress through the game. The starring aspect of Titanfall is the multiplayer mode, in which a red team squares off against a blue team in a hyperkinetic battle royale.

This devotion to multiplayer — commonly reserved for games on a personal computer, always connected to the Internet — could explain some of the excitement about Titanfall. After all, for most players, the TV screen will have a larger, nicer display, and its speakers will be higher quality, too. Porting over the rock-’em-sock-’em thrill of shooting and yelling at strangers in faraway places to the big screen feels smart and exciting for many gamers.

A pilot inside his Titan.

Titanfall also contains special integration with a new version of the Twitch app for Xbox One, released in conjunction with Titanfall. Twitch is an explosively popular site that lets you either live-stream your own gameplay or watch others. According to Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi, the average amount of time a person will spend watching someone else play a game on Twitch is 106 minutes. At peak Internet usage, Twitch ranked fourth in total traffic share, trailing only Netflix, Google and Apple. Titanfall should catapult its usage higher.

Within the next few days or weeks, Microsoft will release its own eye-popping numbers: insane numbers of hours spent playing Titanfall, huge sales, worldwide domination. On its first night, Titanfall already appears to have crashed Microsoft’s servers due to overload.

Titanfall seems destined to enter the pantheon of games that are pervasive in our culture, a line that runs from Super Mario Bros. through Grand Theft Auto to Call of Duty and Halo.

In other words: The only question for Titanfall is just how titanic it will become.

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