Titanfall 2 is a giant among shooters thanks, in part, to its near-flawless depiction of the ultimate power fantasy: causing untold destruction with a massive, gun-toting mech. But Titanfall 2’s very best moments occur when you’re stripped of your walking tank and must survive its industrial sci-fi universe as a mere squishy human.
Into The Abyss, Titanfall 2’s fourth mission, is one of these moments, and marks a monumental achievement in mission design for developer Respawn Entertainment. Set in a factory suspended above an infinite void, a gauntlet of deadly fabrication machines acts as a thrilling and creative showcase for Titanfall’s ambitious movement systems.
To find out how Into The Abyss was put together, IGN spoke to game designer David Shaver, who co-designed the mission with three other developers at Respawn. With his insight, let’s take a look at how this level defies shooter traditions, teaches and reinforces first-person platforming skills, and builds contrasting experiences around movement abilities, all to create one of the most exhilarating FPS campaign missions of all time.
While perhaps not as famous as the time-hopping Effect and Cause, Into The Abyss is one of Titanfall 2’s most complex and demanding missions. A level almost wholly focused on the incredible mobility of your pilot, it’s made up of three distinct sections: the continually shifting assembly line of the World Foundry; the Simulation Dome live-fire training facility, and an escape set piece that culminates in a titan vs titan smackdown. Together, these three segments form a fascinating, memorable mission with a unique approach to movement and momentum.
Into The Abyss is the product of Respawn’s ‘action blocks’, a prototype system in which ambitious, isolated concepts were quickly built and tested. If an action block resonated with the team, it would evolve into a mechanic or a mission for Titanfall 2’s campaign.
During the early days of development, Mohammad Alavi, the designer behind Call of Duty’s iconic All Ghillied Up and No Russian missions, created an action block that featured a titan bursting through a wall as part of a prototype for destructible environments. Fellow game designer David Shaver loved the idea, but knew it was too technically demanding to implement across the entire campaign. And so he began thinking about how he could build a single level around robotic demolition.
“I actually remember the original pitch that I came up with for the level, which I code named BoomTown,” recalls Shaver. “You and BT would be fighting against another Titan, and it'd be kind of like this cool Transformers fight. You'd be smashing through buildings. And then I had the idea ‘Well, once you've smashed through the buildings, that's going to be a boring fight because now the cover's gone and now the levels are gone.’ I was like, ‘What if they replace themselves? Or what if we got new ones?’ So I started thinking about those training facilities, you see the military, they'll prop up replicas of buildings and things with cheap plywood and two by fours.
“I was like, ‘What if we make it so that it's sort of a live fire testing facility, like the training ground Titanfall 1 map, but it changes. Once a building is destroyed, it brings up a new one, or they drop in a new one.’ We had no idea how it would deliver, but a new one would appear, and then you'd fight. And then it just snowballed from there. And then it was like, ‘What's building these things? Maybe we should investigate what's down there.’ And so that birthed what I called the World Foundry, which is the factory that builds all this stuff.”
Shaver, along with design partners Chris "Soupy" Dionne, Jason McCord, and Chad Grenier, worked to turn that concept into a complete mission. They plotted out a level made up of that World Foundry factory, the Simulation Dome it was building, and a cataclysmic escape sequence that would end with a boss fight.
But the idea of BoomTown eventually underwent a huge shift. Ironically for a prototype that began life as two titans fighting, Shaver and the team decided to take away the key feature: your beloved titan, BT-7274.
Solo Pilot
“At the beginning of the level, you're with BT, you're exploring this mystery,” says Shaver. “And then the robot arm grabs BT and takes him away, and now you're like, ‘Oh crap, I don't have my super Iron Man armour anymore. What am I going to do?’
“Most of the prototypes that we had for this level really, really shined when BT either wasn't there or he was helping from a distance or something,” he explains. “And so that's what we rolled with for this level. ‘Okay, this level's mostly about pilot mobility and combat around moving stuff, to get the player ready for the rest of the game. We can focus on that.’”
With BT in the clutches of mission villain Ash, you’re forced to rely solely on the abilities of protagonist Jack Cooper, a titan pilot. Thanks to a small jetpack you’re incredibly agile, able to double-jump over long distances and run along walls as if in the Matrix. It is these skills that the factory floor of the World Foundry was built to train and test.
“We watched streamers and people playing the game during our playtests and a lot of times they struggled with wall running,” Shaver recalls. “And so it was like, ‘Okay, well we need to get people [comfortable] with wall running because that's a core mechanic of Titanfall, and we really want them to be able to do it because if they go into multiplayer, they're going to get owned without it.’”
The original Titanfall had already proved that the player skill ceiling was incredibly high. To train people up to a reasonable standard, the obstacles of Into The Abyss had to be absolutely wild. But it wasn’t the rocket-propelled antics of Quake or Unreal Tournament that inspired its gauntlet of jumps and wall runs: it was a 1999 comedy sci-fi movie.
“One of the inspirations was Galaxy Quest,” Shaver reveals, “where Sigourney Weaver and Tim Allen run into this area in the ship and it's just crazy chompers and fire, and you were like, ‘Why would anybody build this?’ I love that movie. So that's one of the inspirations for this, I was just like, ‘Let's have some of that fun in here.’”
“So the stompy thing was an action block. The roller that was applying dirt and grass was an action block. You stop and robot arms are putting on furniture and walls, that was an action block. The sideways town climb itself was an action block. So we basically were like, ‘Okay, we've got all these really cool pieces, let's stitch them together like Lego blocks.’”
Each new piece of machinery escalates the pace and difficulty. The first is a simple platform jump that you can simply ride to your destination, but you’re soon forced to chain together a jump, wall run, and landing to bypass the turf-laying machine. A further challenge has you wall running between platforms that shift between vertical and horizontal orientations, challenging your agility, timing, and positioning. And all of this happens over a deadly drop into an infinite void, which adds edge-of-your-seat tension to effectively teach the importance of linking together moves.
But before escaping the factory, another two other important lessons are taught. The first comes in the form of the houses that are progressively assembled around you. Walls and furniture slot into place, completely altering your surroundings every few seconds.
“We're teaching the player that the environment is changing, you can't trust it's going to be there, so keep looking around,” Shaver explains. “One of the main things it does is it creates a feeling of uncertainty and dread and instability. That was one of the feelings in the factory, it was just like, ‘I am in danger, I really want my Titan.’ And so that down moment in the player's psyche sets up the up moment of returning to BT later. You're like, ‘Holy crap, I can't believe I survived this.’”
The World Foundry’s final trial is the ‘sideways town’, designed by Dionne. This head-spinning segment has you running upwards through a town mounted to the wall, creating some Inception-like visuals. But it was important to push players through this unusual bit of environment design in order to practically demonstrate how Titanfall 2 rethinks the fundamentals of FPS design.
“When you play a game, a classic shooter like Doom [...] the top third and the bottom third of the screen aren't really that dangerous. But in Titanfall the top two thirds of the screen could be a threat from any direction, pilots are flying through the air as they wall run above you and shoot from above.”
Don’t Fear The Reaper
Conquering the sideways town climb lifts you out of the darkness of the World Foundry and into the artificial sunlight of the next segment of Into The Abyss: the Simulation Dome.