First, the ugly and uglier. Seems like I was even more right than I knew regarding that midnight launches would never be the same. So I did what I could to see how close I could make it to the 12 a.m. PDT online availability of the game. I wanted the digital download and don't regret having it for a second. At 2:00 a.m. EDT, I couldn't make it and off to bed I went. Up at 5:30 a.m., I began the download. And it crept along. At 9:00, when I had to head off to work, I think it was around 45% so I left the machine on.
I know there is supposed to be background and console-off downloading, but for whatever reason, I thought if it were on, it would download it more quickly. I had turned off my auto off function in the settings. When I returned around 3:30 or so, it was only about 70% complete. Still no Titanfall for me. No training, no nothing but a slow crawl that looked like maybe, it had even stopped. So I hard-powered down and tried again and it seemed to move along a little better. Around 5:00, I finally had the game and ran through the demo. I hadn't completed the entire demo in the Beta so I figured I would, for the chivo if nothing else.
Went out for a bit and turned the Xbox One and system on around 6:30. Had it on the rest of the night for listening to music, watching TV with the wife, and Titanfall later. I would later discover that being on maybe saved me from a long night of grief, not that I still didn't feel awful for the way the Xbox Live failure and its blemish on the Titanfall launch ruined the fun a bit.
Logged in to XBL, I popped on about 9:30 p.m. and played until a little after 2:00. I loved just about every minute of it. There was some getting used to the party system and invites and it didn't take us long to discover that hitting the party limit of six will happen with more frequency than I'd like. But the game itself feels great. Win or lose, good game or bad game, I never felt frustrated. I never felt over-matched or that a higher ranked opponent had better weapons or loadouts. I never saw lag, perhaps the occasional framerate stutter, but definitely no occasion to cry shenanigans or toast. Perhaps in the restrictions and set-up, that has been taken care of. All this and with at least one or two people broadcasting the action on Twitch as well? The future of gaming? It certainly can be bright albeit with bumps on the road. That's one thing we joked about last night, this idea that the game is still in process, that a later update will add options, fix or improve resolution, add gametypes and Voltron.
Is it the greatest thing since Halo 2? COD4:MW? Gears of War? I don't know. But what I do know is that I have a lot of friends playing it and that, to me, is a system seller. That makes it worthy of the hype. That is why I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. playing... oh, that and wanting to unlock the Stryder chassis for my custom Titan loadout.
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