Titanfall Xbox One Alpha Video Features Assassinations, Titan Squads

Titanfall Alpha Gameplay by Fran78888

New alpha footage from the closed alpha of Titanfall taking place right now on the Xbox One has emerged. I'll go ahead and get it out of the way early, but the game really does look a heck of a lot like Call of Duty with mechs.

The play-style, super-fast reloading, weapon handling, and soft aim-assist are almost notch for notch carry-overs from the Call of Duty franchise. Nevertheless, that's to be expected given that Respawn Entertainment was the former Infinity Ward and the brilliant minds that really helped put Call of Duty on the map during the seventh gen with Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2.

Moving back to the subject matter at hand and the topic of Titanfall... the footage comes courtesy of Daily Motion user Fran78888. Fran, you can expect a rather nasty e-mail from EA before the weekend is out.

DualShockers ended up catching wind of the footage and posting it up for all the public to see, oogle and fawn over.

But there's no room for fawning in this article; if all this happened to be was a puff piece for the player posted promotional material then that would simply make us advertorial Doritocrats... and we partake in that enough already.

Time for the criticisms: So if you look at the scoreboard at the end of the match you'll see that no one killed more players than they killed grunts. One of our readers adequately summed up Titanfall as the first foray into MOBA-territory as a first-person shooter. I agree.

The scoreboard at the end of the match shows that three out of the six players on blue team averaged nearly five bot kills per every player kill. One of the players nearly had double the bot kills than player kills, and two of the others had a few more bot kills than player kills.

The orange/brown/whatever color that is at the bottom fared even worse than blue team. However, at least their top player actually managed more human player kills than bot kills, which shows that he was at least engaging more humans than computer controlled opponents.

What does this have to do with anything? It shows that players are encountering more bots and killing more bots than they are engaging and interacting with other players, almost like your typical MOBA. In the case of the blue team, they interacted with the bots more than four and a half times as they did with opposing human players.

In short, the 6-vs-6 limitation does impact how players interact with each other... for better or for worse. The long-term reaction to this restriction is going to be based on how gamers feel about that interaction, and that will determine if Titanfall's multiplayer will be deemed a success or not.

With the game's early March release inbound in two months, I'm sure Respawn should be prepping the beta within the next week or so, and prepping to go gold a week after that. They seem like they are definitely cutting the custard close as far as release dates and alpha testing goes.