jesus fuck so many people are commenting about this game that haven't even fucking played it. I hate all of you. Stop.
I have 20 hours in this game already. It is absolutely nothing like CoD other than the fact that its a first person shooter WTF. Health/damage output is somewhere inbetween CoD and Halo, meaning that you aren't squishy like CoD but you don't have to gang up to kill eachother like in Halo, it's a very solid middle ground. Pilot vs Pilot combat (players outside of mechs) is going to favor those good at Unreal/Quake style gameplay. You have to constantly be maneuvering as fast as you can, and dodging erratically to stay alive. This doesn't mean "running around on the ground in and out of cover like every other game ever." It means you have to constantly be taking calculated wall jumps and ground jumps to keep the positioning you need. Two skilled pilots can end up fighting for a good 30 seconds before one of them actually wins, just because they are constantly trying to outmaneuver the other. It's extremely exciting to play, and nearly impossible to sit on a building with a sniper and try to pick people off. You have to get balls deep in this game, and it's awesome.
Titans are not CoD style killstreaks - everyone is going to get at least 2 per game no matter what. They are based on time, and killing enemies simply knocks seconds at a time off that countdown. You can be 0-10 and still get 2 titans. When you get in a Titan, your entire perspective on the game changes. You no longer have aerial mobility, however your ground movement speed is higher than that of pilots so you can still cover ground fairly quickly. The game turns into a mix of Halo/DOTA where you have to make calculated team pushes and counterpushes to make progress against an enemy team. You cannot go balls deep with titans, you WILL get destroyed. Hard. With everyone focusing on the push/counterpush gameplay, which is slow, some players are going to branch off to farm all of the AI grunts in the game. Killing them shaves time off your Titan's "Core Ability", which is constantly charging once you call in your Titan. Core abilities are tied to each Titan, and they consist of Damage Boost, Shield Boost, and Dash Boost (not positive on this name -- gives unlimited dashes). Once you get your titan's core ability up, the meta again shifts and helps big pushes happen. This doesn't even begin to include the Ogre and Strider titans which are not normally selectable in the beta, they will allow significantly different tanking and flanking strategies in the full game.
Once Titans start going down, the meta shifts again into Pilot vs Titan combat, and it's also hella balanced and fun. Without going into too much detail if a pilot gets the jump on a Titan, he can take out 1/4 of its health EASY, no problem. As long as the pilot can move around quickly, he can keep harassing a Titan and either lock it down in one area, or force it to retreat and take extra damage in doing so. If the pilot is sloppy though, or the titan is a crack shot, youre getting gibbed and knocking 30 seconds off the Titan's Core ability charge time... NOT SMART
This game doesn't reward CoD players at all. Everyone that plays this game like CoD fails terribly. The best comparison in basic skillset is quake, but really you can't compare this game to anything else. You have to be a good Titanfall player.
Oh, and on the topic of large amounts of ammo: Your reloads are based on magazines, not ammo left in clip, I guess? What I mean is that when you reload, you lose any ammo that was left in that mag. So if you have 11 extra mags, you have 11 reloads, whether you shoot 1 or 30 rounds out of that mag. Period. You get so much because a big part of the game is disengaging pilots and steamrolling through grunts/spectres. You chew through ammo really fast kiling those dudes.
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