“Titanfall is part of our DNA,” the latest announcement from Respawn Entertainment said, before revealing that they are undergoing gene therapy. Titanfall 1, the studio’s first game, will be dropped from sale today and will disappear from subscription services on March 1, 2022. That’s the inevitable end for the mech game to run on. wall, a multiplayer experiment that began cutting itself off just a few months after its release.
A note on Titanfall. pic.twitter.com/Ew232HkUIo
– Rework (@Respawn) December 1, 2021
“We have made the decision to stop selling the new original Titanfall game starting today, and we will be removing the game from subscription services on March 1, 2022,” reads the post. “However, we will keep the servers running for the dedicated fan base still playing and those who own the game and are looking to join a match.”
Titanfall has had a rough history lately. It Come to Steam late last year but in an unplayable state. The bug prevented players from connecting to servers, and servers that manage the connection have often encountered hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in the game’s old multiplayer code. Titanfall 1 – and Apex Legends modern version – also experienced common DDOS attacks. In April, Respawn tweeted that “help will come ASAP” to deal with the attack, but nothing materialized. At the time of writing, Titanfall has a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam.
While Titanfall is technically still playable, very few players are doing it right now. It’s a sad end to what was a good game. This is what the handsome former editor Graham Smith (RPS in peace) had to say in Review Titanfall:
Freed from the need to worry about convincing you that you’re special, Titanfall instead builds a set of systems in which heroism and glory occur naturally. There is no “Titan level” that resembles Battlefield’s brief jet-sets; Instead, have the ability, every two minutes, to summon your own robotic friend from orbit. No running to the door and waiting like a patient dog while the NPC owner rushes to open it for you; instead there’s the ability to overcome any obstacle by wall-running and double-jumping, and the opportunity to deftly link those moves together into a nimble, skilful battle.
However, I retracted many of my compliments two months later, when Respawn discards its best mode.
Titanfall 1 can be seen as a half step up from today’s live-serve games. It’s unusual in 2014 for a major first-person shooter to launch without a campaign, and it’s still relatively new for a multiplayer game to launch without a dedicated server. Browse servers or support mods. That’s all commonplace these days, and nobody seems to blink an eye when Apex Legends drops a mode or map for something new. The difference at the time was that Titanfall wasn’t a free game, and paying £45 for something that started falling apart soon after didn’t feel great.
So, there. While Titanfall remains ‘playable’ to those who purchased it, its removal for sale ends all hope that it will be supported or repaired. The graveyard of multiplayer games is going to get bigger and bigger and I hope one day GOG or a similar service will start working on restoring them, the same way they did with previous DOS games. this.
