Titanfall 2: Science, Magic, American Civil War In Space
Titans will fall (again)
If you are looking for a tale of magic and science, wrapped up in space warfare it looks like fiscal year 2017* may bring you joy as Titanfall 2's single-player campaign seeks to offer exactly that.
Speaking to Forbes, the game's lead writer Jesse Stern promised:
"What inspires us is the junction of technological advancement with the inevitability of conflict and war and what the next war might look like. In Titanfall 2 there will be a lot of [scenes] where science meets magic, but keeping it grounded and dirty and human and real."
I am trying to remember the first Titanfall at the moment. I think I had a gun and I think it could sort of auto-aim but not quite? Also wall running might have been a thing. Was wall running a thing? Wait. There were titans but they were... robots? ROBOTS! You sat inside them until they blew up or you ejected! BUT THEN Blizzard made D.Va a character in Overwatch and she was a mech pilot and former pro-gamer from Busan, South Korea who can summon a bubblegum pink mech during battle and she's pretty great and I'd long since stopped trying to play Titanfall. I would settle for Titanfall 2 being the story of D.Va's squadmates preparing for battle by biffing each other.
It isn't. Although I could maybe write that fanfiction.
INSTEAD Stern describes his and his colleagues' work as follows:
"So we are doing our best to deliver a vision of grand global colonial warfare retelling the story of the American Revolution and the American Civil War in space. We imagined the next generation of immigrants moving out to the new frontier of an inhabitable planet. Rather than taking a traditional sci-fi approach to that we wanted to look at how that would happen practically, what the ships would look like and with machines that were designed for excavation and construction, demolition and working the land, and what happens when they are turned into instruments of war."
Isn't the American Civil War and American Westward Expansion in space what Firefly was about? I'm wondering if this will go in a similar direction. I'm not really sure where the magic comes into all this. Adam suggested it might be a DESTINY MOON WIZARDS type thing. Tom over at Eurogamer thinks it might be "magic" as in advanced and unfamiliar technology.
I'd favour moon wizards of the two. That or the titans get a cool setting where they can perform stage magic and must face off against each other to see who is better at card tricks and escapology and things. You could either fight people or just astound them by telling them their card was the four of hearts. This would only work if their card had actually been the four of hearts, by the way. That's why not everyone can be a magician.
*That's the year which starts in April 2016 and goes til the end of March 2017. In the financial zodiac it is also known as the Year Of The Financially Prudent Octopus. We are currently in the Year Of The Spendthrift Centipede.