The Evolution of Rodeo in Titanfall 2

[Music] hello everybody my name is shin seung chung i'm a designer at Respawn Entertainment welcome to my talk standing on the shoulders of giants I was so less pretentiously known as the evolution of rodeo and titanfall so quick reminder please turn off all their cellphones we got a lot of ground to cover and only 16 minutes to do so so we're just gonna get right to it so what is rodeo in titanfall well in case you've never played the games before but for some reason are still interested in this talk the titan falls to use of games are first-person shooters featuring acrobatic wall-running pilots dueling massive armored titans on the battlefield one of their signature moments of the game is something we call rodeo we're crafty pilots can sneak up on unsuspecting titan and jump onto the back so in titanfall one pilots rip off an access panel and they shoot the exposed circuitry to do heavy damage in titanfall 2 however rodeo becomes a

cat-and-mouse game of the pilot stealing a Titan battery taking a chunk of the Titans health and then the attendant frantically hunting down the pilot to get the battery back so what I'll do during this talk is a give a highlighted tour of the history of rodeo it won't be an exhaustive list of everything we tried with rodeo are those who peak here all day but will cover the major milestones along the way provide some insight about the unique design challenges for rodeo not many other games feature classes as distinct as pallet and Titan and making rodeo be a satisfying mechanic for both has actually some surprisingly difficult constraints which will go further into and lastly we'll go into what we think

went well as well as what we think went poorly with rodeo specifically we'll talk about some of the rationale behind their huge changes we made for rodeo between titanfall 1 & 2 and why we think it makes for better gameplay incidentally what this talk will not go into is any in-depth details of the technical and implementation of rodeo so if you're hoping to get details of that I'm sorry to disappoint but in the beginning so back in August 2012 what was eventually going to be titanfall was slowly but surely taking shape after spending years prototyping several concepts we decided to focus on two classes for our multiplayer only game while running double jumping super acrobatic pilots and giant mechanized weapons of destruction called Titans and idea was that players would start the game in the Titan and then when it got really hurt they could eject away and get a second life as a pilot an early idea we had was what if a pilot could jump onto the back of a Titan and do heavy damage to it and we called the idea rodeo rodeo was supposed to give pilot players another meaningful way to interact with enemy titans other than

just shooting at them from afar like the typical FPS and the picture you see here was painted by one of our designers Jeff Smith early on to give an idea as to what this David versus Goliath David versus Goliath moment could look like so that was our first design goal for rodeo giveaway for pilots to meaningfully interact with titans potentially doing heavy damage to them of course we didn't have the entirety of titanfall design back when we first started implementing rodeo as work on the game increased so did our understanding of what it was we were making and now understanding for what other goals need to be hit for rodeo I'll come back to these goals as I show you the various iterations already we had and how they were trying to do different things so the very first major duration for rodeo had pilots immediately pop into place on the back of a tight when he jumped near detecting after a short amount of time an explosive will be planted and tiny which would blow the Titan up so as you can see this addition is super bare-bones and simple but even

then it quickly revealed a ton of issues that rody had to contend with that weren't immediately obvious and the first and most glaring issue was that of communication how do you tell the Titan player what's happening so it's a first-person game and the Titan player literally can't see that a pilot player is jumping on your back and what they're doing once they got there as a pilot there the problem is less apparent since rodeo is pilot initiated and the animations that effects should convey what's going on but since rodeo is a fairly unique element to titanfall there's still quite a bit of a learning curve involved NYX once they understand what's going on what should both sides do once rodeo starts clearly would the idea of the 10 player could somehow react to what was going on and meaningful choices could be made on both the pilot and the Titan that would affect the outcome lastly how long should an entire sequence take too long and would distract from the main combat of the game but too short and it wouldn't be you wouldn't be able to give the beat to deserve there's a cinematic moment of course these aren't the only problems with rodeo but these are issues

at the heart of rodeo that all versions already have to contend with and solve so if that in mind let's take a look at how the first iteration of rodeo looks like from the perspective of the Titan [Music] so as mentioned this first major iteration of rodeo is implemented without us fully understanding the issues involved but it's useful for us to take a look at how it address those issues as a baseline we can use for future rodeo attempts firstly communication since this first major iteration of rodeo we've handled this problem primarily through HUD elements and sound these are the first and most obvious things to try and ball you're not perfect they kind of do the job when the pilot climbs on the 10 gets hot elements on screen saying you are being rodeoed this is true even in the final ship versions of titanfall intent well too second choice so for the pilot once Rhoda starts the input sorry the sequence completes without any further

input however the pilot can also choose at any time to cancel the process by manually jumping off for the Titan they've needed to find some way of removing the pilot before rody was completed and otherwise they died other than having a teammate shoot off the pilot for them the two main ways the Titan could remove the pilot were to disembark from Titan and shoot the pilot off manually or use Electric smoke and a quick sidebar in case you didn't already know Electric smoke was a Titan ability that as the name suggests deployer is a cloud of lightning around the tighten that zaps anyone in its immediate vicinity you can see how this would be useful for a time to get the rodeo pilot off his back at this stage of the game however it was kind of like a super move from Street Fighter so you had to charge up a bar before you could deploy it so the ability to kill rodeo pilots if it was somewhat limited length so this iteration of rodeo lasted about a total of six seconds and I'll play test revealed that this was probably a bit on shorten as it gave a little time for the time to react to what was going on before they died but that said from the play test we were also pretty confident it shouldn't take

30 seconds or so to complete either so that gave us the range of maybe about 10 to 20 seconds or so as probably and I do win newest how long the process should take so even though this version of rodeo clearly had lots of things to improve on it's important to focus and see if it did what it's a lot to do did a giveaway for pilots to meaningfully interact with Titans potentially doing heavy damage to them and I think that yes we could agree we did indeed hit this design goal pilots can now jump up onto Titans and blow them of an explosive however having rodeo be a binary outcome where the Titan was either totally destroyed or totally undamaged was kind of unsatisfying when a pilot when when the Titan won the pilot could feel like all his hard work in getting up close accomplished absolutely nothing when the pilot won the Titan was instantly destroyed and this was counter to the idea that players could feel safer in a giant armored Titan and on top of that there was a desire for more player choice in the sequence having it just be a canned animation sequence for the pilot wasn't quite ideal and 10 players won at more ways to get the pilots off their backs so that led us to the next major design

goal for rodeo make rodeo be a process of a more dynamic range of outcomes affected by player choices and skill and the next iteration of rodeo had you holding down on a trigger to do a steadily increasing amount of damage to tighten the idea was that pilots would have a special rodeo drill weapon that you could take out during rodeo and holding down on trigger would activate it so note that about the presentation for this is really rough it's actually not too far mechanics-wise from the final version of a route that we shipped with intent for one you can also see the inspiration from the original piece of concept art that we showed that I showed earlier and this is how it looked back from the Chinese perspective so how did

this version compared to the previous one with regards to the communication once again primarily through huddle Vincent sound that we tell tightening pilot what's going on since the drill the process was a continuous process as opposed to the previous discrete process that gave more time for a fixing sound etc to be played which helped the communication process for the technique for choice this time around the pilot had to choose to fire the weapon instead of being locked into a fully animated sequence now in this iteration we only started giving the Titan in the warning that they were getting rode it when the pilot started firing the weapon so there was an element of when the pilot should start firing a weapon for maximum effect ideally you'd start firing when a tenant was already distracted fighting other players for tends not much change the two main choices remain to disembark and shoot the pilot off or to use Electric smoke lengths this iteration of rodeo had a variable length but to take the Titan from full health disease or lasted a bit longer than for about 10 seconds or so although this is more easily to Keable than before by adjusting the amount of damage at the drill up and did

now we hit the design goals of deceleration of rodeo first goal was still preserved so we'll check that off and for the second goal having the damage to the Titan be applied over time made for a vastly increased dynamic range of outcomes for rodeo let Titan players were good at getting rodeo pilots off escape with minimal damage while letting rodeo pilots who failed to kill the Titans they'll feel like they did something so yeah we'll call that a success and while this version of rodeo playtested fairly well the presentation needed a lot of work it also didn't help that we were technically unable to do the next step of putting an actual gun into the pilot's hands Malraux doing the code features we needed to really sell this feature just weren't quite there yet at this point in development time however we were running very close to an internal milestone we needed to be able to present the game at an internally marketing event and the current form of rodeo was way too far from being show bull this is this was especially pressing because we were trying to sell the concept of a cinematic multiplayer for titanfall so that led us to the next major design goal for rodeo make it

really be visually compelling this next major iteration of rodeo we tried involved planting sheep charges that we called K burrs on the back of the Titan after you jumped on we take multiple keepers to finish off a full health Titan the rodeo pilot would have to aim at specific spots depend the charges and the spot to be semi randomized and the tenth player could also affect the aim of the rodeo pilot by dashing around and this is how the playfun tanks perspective [Music]

so once again we'll take a look at how this version of rodeo addressed issues before communication primarily through sound in this version we had actually removed the big flashing you are being rodeoed warnings as part of a conscious response to feedback that there was always too many things on screen in our crazy chaotic game you could hear a thunk as each capers planted but that was about it playtesting did show however that we really did need some kind of visual element on the screen to tell you that roadie was being done to you so we eventually brought it back choice from the pilots perspective this was kind of like a mix between iterations 1 & 2 instead of a single planted explosive the pilot chose to plant as many as they wanted before jumping off and dead and detonating them all if the player died before jumping off however all the capers would just disappear not much change with regards to the tank they could still use electric smoke or disembarking shoot off the pilot lastly lengths this iteration of rodeo is definitely slower than the previous iterations it took about 15 seconds or so to plant enough Cabras the detangling would die from them same thing as before let's look to see if we hit the design

goals the first and the second design goals were still intact so we'll check those off and this original video definitely looked more polished in the previous one and we successfully demoed it at the EEA marketing event so yeah we'll say we hit that goal however internally play test feedback suggested that this version of rodeo was kind of too much like a minigame planting the keepers at random spots had to be taught and as a multiplayer only game without a single-player campaign mechanics that needed to be taught we're kind of already at the limit and that led us the next major design goal for rodeo make rodeo be accessible so given the feedback from iteration 3 we decided to revisit the duration - and actually do the technical work needed to finish it up we put in code features to properly handle putting a weapon into player's hands while they were attached to the Titan and a player then you needed to shoot his weapon at a week's a weak spot on Titan

so we were still harboring the idea that when the ten player knew that he was being groped he could throw off the name of the pilot on his back by dashing around and smashing themselves into walls etc so we made the weak point a relatively small area on the time we had art making us a little hatch panel that we attached the titan and then we had animation and damage effects for ripping it off and shooting into it and our initial placed us were pretty positive it felt like it we had finally struck the right balance between it being fun easy to understand accessible and it being cinematic there was there were a few annoying lingering issues the view of the Titan strongly affecting the view of the rodeo pilot so when the 10-2 round when he turned rapidly the pilots view would kind of lurch right along the sudden jolt of motion and it sometimes made rodeo maybe somewhat nauseating but generally we thought this is it this is what rodeos going to be like unfortunately fixing the view issues took some time and we were running

really close to our ship date so we decided to shelve any attempt to try and have the Titans dashing around throw off the aim of the rodeo pilot this is the perspective of the Titan so once again we'll run through the list of issues since iteration four is pretty much a more polished version of iteration two you can expect that this part is gonna be pretty similar communication primarily through how elements and sound however with the addition of a hatch panel and the brains of the tenant we made rodeo more grounded there was a actual physical thing that pilots ripped out in shot at this helped sell the concept of what was going on to the pilot a lot better it also gave us the gameplay benefit of the first rodeo attempt point in time taking longer to start up as the panel had to be ripped out first but subsequent

attempts would let the pilot start shooting immediately choice so with regards to the pilot this was very similar to addition to however the hatch panel having to removed before the pilot could fire the weapon was an additional prerequisite to be fulfilled for the timing we enhanced their existing choices first by this time Electric smoke had become a regular Titan ability that could be used on cooldown so it became much more effective of a counter for rodeo secondly to help players disembark and shoot the pilot off we made the players auto Titan new down if it was being rodeoed so this is a video that shows that so before we added this functionality however um when rodeo the players out at hand would keep trying to face the pilot on its back shooting it so you know it kind of had about as much effect as a dog chasing its own tail since the auto title now Neal there was much easier to shoot the pilot off and it also gave us a way to visually communicate from afar that the auto Titan was getting rodeoed length so this

iteration I really had a variable length but to take retain from full health to zero lasts about 15 to 20 seconds which is the longest of all the durations we had so far as mentioned before this is about long enough for attendants to react to what's going on and for us to sell the cinematic experience of it but not too long where it starts to drag on like a separate minigame did we hit the design goals first goal is definitely intact in fact at this point since we had added the concept of shields to the Titan we made rodeo damage bypass the shield and that increased the strategic value of doing rodeo as opposed to just firing an anti-tank weapon normally the second goal is intact as well just by the nature of letting how much damage a pilot does be dependent on how long he stays on a Titan which can be affected by both pilot and Titan choices and we hit the third design go to by doing a bunch more presentation work having the technical feature to have a player hold onto a gun while row doing having a hatch panel that reacted to being shot it all helped us all the experience lastly accessibility we think that rodeo

in titanfall one is actually pretty accessible to new players the only inputs involve the rodeo as a pilot our one jump towards the Titan and to shoot your gun at a weak point these are actions we ask the player to do in the rest of the game and as such it's actually very feasible that a player we have no information whatsoever can stumble upon rodeo during the course of normal gameplay and understand instantly how to play it it's literally less accessible from the Titans perspective but we've done things like make the Titan OS call out when you're getting rodeoed and even advise you to disembark and remove the pilot from your hull overall I think the accessibility of rodeo is a big win at this point in time we've arrived at how reduce shipped in titanfall 1 I think it's appropriate to take a step back and reflect the bit deeper and some of the things we thought went well with rodeo and lots of well firstly and most importantly rodeo proved to be popular with players in titanfall far and away the most important thing when you're developing a new mechanic is if players enjoy it or not all internal play test feedback is often a good barometer for success nothing beats actual player feedback

there's plenty of YouTube videos of epic rodeo moments and cinnamon on rodeo is generally positive so we'll treat that as a win balanced general sentiment in the communities that rodeo is fairly well balanced even among high level competitive players there's a bit of a divide between whether pilots or tanks have the upper hand when it comes to rodeo some really powerful tactics available to both pilot and 10 players in a 1v1 situation so for example tendons can use the cluster missile and crouch and Crouch looking upwards to pin the rodeo pilot with their backs against the wall until kill them from the explosion at the cost of heavy damage to themselves pilots can jump on instead of just shooting their weapon into the weak spot they can attempt to call down a warm fall tighten on your opponent eliminating both tighten and pilot in one quick move so we'll take the fact

that rodeo is deep enough to support multiple advanced tactics as a win - returning back to one ball for titanfall one's version of rodeo fantasy fulfillment aspect David versus Goliath is always a popular trope and rodeo evokes that imagery very well another thing that went well with rodeo organic interactions with the tiny eject system ejecting from your doom tendon and onto the back of a Titan who's shooting you it's a very satisfying highlight in our game that happens as a natural result of both systems working as intended so this is a short clip from our e3 review trailer showcasing the moment from ejecting from your Titan into a rodeo [Music] the other interaction that comes with eject is when you were check from your

Titan and when an enemy player is ro doing you both of you in the Rhodope layer are thrust high into the air when you can have an epic duel ball falling down this is a lot more deliberate than the first interaction it had plenty of bugs but we think the end result is very much worth it this is a clip from YouTube that show Kali that showcases that moment so lastly since we allow players on the same team to rotate their teammates or as we like to call it brodeo there's a number of interact interesting interactions that result first of all since only one person can be rotating a tendon at a time bro doing blocks enemy rodeo attempts from happening secondly bro doing is a great way for a Titan to quickly ferry palaces to destinations for example in CTF since times can't carry flags a popular tactic is to have your pilot teammate pick up the flag have him jump on a Titan teammate and have the tendon carry the pilot quickly to the flag cap base and

so here I pick the video from YouTube showing the brodeo flat cap and how excited the players are to pull this off [Music] I didn't know thank you bro so to encourage this teamwork element of rodeo we even added a feature where as long as the Titan carrying the pilot has shields any damage that the pilot passenger would take is passed on first to the shields and these small things add a very much needed amount of teamwork in the game so now that we've patted ourselves on the back of it it's time to be a bit more harsh and look at what we think went poorly for rodeo first the back-and-forth between the 10 and the

pilot could be improved note that even though we previously said that rodeo supported a wide range of high-level tactics there's generally a lack of meaningful things that the tanker can do as is a Titan electric smoke as an option is the load-out choice but when activated it really doesn't offer much in a way of interesting gameplay beyond you know activate it and wait for the pilot to die or jump off the cluster missile yourself in the corner tactic is kind of awkward and it's a sign that there isn't really a better option for Tiny's to do getting out from your Titan to shoot the pilot is a valid option but having to disembark feels like a bit of a concession that you don't really have an option as a Titan in addition to that in our in office play test once the 10 player here's the curtain on the rodeo pilot climbing on the 10 player often disembarks immediately and tries to shoot him off the rodeo pilot then tries to jump off and take out the newly disembark player or he hides somewhere and this can lead to a very frustrating game of get out get in get out I didn't seek for the 10 player and this YouTube video shows this loop of the player getting out of Titan getting back in repeat so he gets out there's

the dealer on him he jumps off he's like okay I guess I'm getting back in my Titan gets back in he notices the guy still on his back and it's like alright fine I'm getting out if I still shoot him and the word pilot jumps again the Sampey fix going back in before actually shooting the pilot off so another thing that went poorly for rodeo aiming during a pro do we talked about Brody having useful applications but actually staying on top of a friendly Titan and trying to shoot a target can be an exercise in frustration tendons move at a really fast clip and a lot of the screen of the of the Brody player is taken up by the model of the Titan which makes it very hard to shoot anything accurately last of all readability as mentioned before Titans can move really quickly and only one person can rodeo at a time sometimes when you turn the corner and see an enemy 10 close by you just jump out in reaction it's hard to see sometimes though the tyne already has somebody rotating him and if it does it often ends when the pilots untimely death as he gets squished by The Walking

Titan this is a constant source of frustration alright so that was how rody was developed in titanfall 1 we're about halfway into the top how's everybody doing alright alright so hold on tight because now we're going to go into the story of how and why we did rodeo in titanfall 2 so even though we clearly understood that rodeo in 10 for 1 wasn't perfect and could be in that still doesn't quite explain why we decided to totally change row drastically from 10 for 1 to 10 for 2 as a reminder we went from this to this [Music] and this is the view from the Titans perspective so to give some context as

to why we changed earlier the way we did we first need to get some history and an experiment we did 210 health and an effort to have a better sense of pacing during Titan fights we tried a system where instead of having shields hens had a series of health tickets these health Chiclets would regenerate over time much like she used it in time for one but once the chiclet was gone that portion of health was lost permanently the idea was that it would give there's a sense of when they could play aggressively when a chiclet was full and when I should play defensively when they checked with is low when the player lost the chiclet the ten would get a short period of invincibility similar to getting knocked down and fighting games like in Street Fighter it would allow the victim some time to breathe recover and plan what to do next so if you look at the top of the screen you notice that there's the health blue health bar is divided into three sections or the Chiclets as we call them you know you can also see that enemy health bar in yellow is similarly divided into three

so notice that as we fire an enemy tenant as long as we don't do enough damage to cross the chiclet threshold you will be able to regen all the health you lost but once you cross the chiclet threshold the enemy becomes temporarily invulnerable and he has a shield to protect him once the invulnerability fades that first self chiclet you can damage the Titan again but that first health chiclet of health is now permanently lost and he only regions up to the second chicklet so unfortunately the health chocolate system did not play very well over rodeo at all since you could region all the damage you took until you lost a chiclet it became a very common occurrence that rody wouldn't do enough damage to finish off a chiclet which meant the pilot player didn't do any lasting damage at all and this was made worse by the fact that under the chiclet system attendants didn't have a concept of a normal shield anymore which meant that a rodeo damage which bypassed the shield wasn't as advantages anymore as compared to a regular damage the invulnerable invulnerability period

also played havoc with the pacing of rodeo the early iterations of the health checklist system gave the time the dome jewel for a few seconds and that's the red shield that protects a time during titanfall that also does damage to enemies inside it it also forcibly threw the rodeo pilot off the Titan to avoid the pilot getting killed by the dome shield we gave the Titan eventually for other reasons we stopped giving the time the dome she'll but we still gave the Titan a period of invulnerability which meant that rodeo shots during that time just did no damage at all so a pilot had to stop firing for a while and the health chocolates experiments lasted for a while so it became pressing first to see if you could make roadie work of it instead of having rodeo bee and then essentially broken state for too long once we agree that something needs to be done for ado the design actually came together fairly quickly since we wanted to keep the pacing of health chocolates it was pretty intuitive that we made were to just do a single Chiclets worth of damage to spin it so that when the Chiclets threshold would always be triggered when you rodeo and the time would have that moment of being able to catch their breath and reorient it themselves after getting rodeo the idea

of batteries was also being floated around in design discussions when we were talking about potential systems to limit how long time it stayed on battlefield so for example maybe each tendon only had a minute worth of power but players could pick up batteries to extend this time this seemed like a great fit for rodeo and how Chiclets we could make Chiclets be visually represented on health bars batteries and rodeo be the act of removing one of these batteries and made the act of row doing one trickle of damage a lot more understandable and the whole concept came together pretty well so if rodeo was the act of removing a battery it was a natural step for a bro due to be the reverse of inserting a battery and restoring a chiclet it's a simple idea but actually has pretty far-reaching implications nothing else in the game allow you to help your teammates in such a direct fashion um suddenly there's a whole new vector for players to contrib to winning the match instead of just killing the opponent titanfall had a kind of reputation as being a game that favored a very low wolf type of style of playing the game but now that your allies could heal you there was suddenly a lot more coordination more communication we hear feedback from play tests that players would think they're

going to lose the fight against an enemy Titan but out of nowhere teammates to use the battery from this hacker and plunges into the back allowing them to turn the tables on the fight and more than anything else the positive vibes that resulted from this interaction was what convinced us that this iteration of Rodia was something we should commit to shipping in fact we thought this version of battery style Rodya was strong enough that we did we decided to ship it even though in the end the inspiration helped chicklets didn't ship so here we'll see gameplay footage of a player in the battery medic role at the last time in standing match he's trying to keep the last tie known as team alive by feeding him batteries as you see he's able to turn the tide of the battle by effectively being a healer first teammate here the last time I'm getting you a battery we're trying to get you a battery

I'm getting this battery - you can make it good job so another seemingly small but important change that resulted from this was the duration of rodeo since we only wanted pilots to do a Chiclets worth of damage from stealing a battery and we wanted them to take that battery to insert into a friendly Titan it seemed obvious that we kicked the pilot off automatically after the sealing battery sequence is complete and with this change roadie was shifted away from being a long process that happened over a period of time to a short event that has follow-up gameplay for the pilot the game plays together with the precious stolen battery and deliver it to a teammate for the Titan the gameplay used to now chase down the pilot and take back the battery this new cat-and-mouse

element of post-review gameplay reinforce some of the broader gameplay themes we had with titanfall it also confirmed some of the suspicions I had previously about tenfold once rodeo that the actual worst part of it is the pilot shooting the Titans hatch panel from the pilots perspective shooting a basically stationary target reloading and repeating until the Titan is dead is not very interesting mechanically speaking from the Titans perspective a general lack of tools other than electric smoke to get the pilot shooting you off your back was kind of frustrating but now that the gameplay part of rodeo lies and what happens after the battery is stolen the weapons the kids the mechanics when the rest of the game all play a part and whether or not the pilot can get away which makes for a richer gameplay experience for example the pilots can use the grappling hook to speed away quickly they can use cloak or phase shift to disorientate the tightness to where they actually are they can use wall running to quickly scamper up buildings and onto rooftops tents can use their dash to quickly catch up thus keeping pilot and use their assorted weapons to kill the pilot and retrieve the battery and with that the base design for rode in titanfall 2 was

complete the first major iteration of this battery style rodeo was completed in early July 2015 and even though we added more features to support it the overall design didn't change forever but since then some examples of things that we added to help the experience are the ability to use the battery on the players own Titan by embarking on into the time with it so this weakens an incentive to help a teammate with the battery somewhat but it does reduce the frustration when you manage to steal a battery but you have no teammates to give the battery to over hit indicator for the battery for the tank so with the speed at which pilots can move in our game it's very easy to visually lose track of the pilot hurt they can't announce gameplay we were trying to support the indicator as of release last for about 10 seconds before fading out which we thought was a good balance it's long enough for the Titan to not have to drop everything immediately and chased after the pilot but short enough that the pilot doesn't if you punished forever for not being able to quickly get rid of the battery an ability for the pilot to call out the friendly attendants that they have a battery in an ideal world this would already be handled through verbal

communications over microphone but this allows even pickup groups to communicate and coordinate to some extent this is in response to feedback that it was very frustrating to chase after a friendly Tennant when you were trying to give them a battery but the time would be oblivious of you trying to help and since we were committing to the battery being a physical object that the pilot would carry around it made sense to limit pilots to only be able yeah to only carry around a single battery initially we tried to just flat-out disallow players from loading if they already carried a battery but this fought too much against feedback that players wanted to keep pro during the enemy Titan so to satisfy this repeated request for pilots to keep rolling we made a different version of audio for players while already carrying a battery instead of sealing more batteries the pilot will Chuck a grenade on the port of the thing since we wanted to encourage this hide-and-seek game play of stealing a battery and running away of it we tried to discourage grenade rodeo by making it

to half as much damage as at the regular rodeo so for completeness sake we'll run through a list of issues again and see how it stacks up to the previous attempts communication same as before we rely mainly on HUD element and sound to sell the experience to the player admittedly this aspect is probably a bit we couldn't and fall time fall ones version of rodeo since the concept of a battery and having to steal it insert it into friendlies is much more abstract than just shooting into the weak point of an enemy Titan on the plus side however since sine fall - as a full single-player campaign we were able to rely on the campaign to teach some of the mechanics with batteries indeed the first thing that bTW the single-player campaigns Titan asks you to do is to bring him some batteries so he can recover from a deep powered state choice as mentioned before much of the choice for rodeo has now shifted to the part after the pilot steals the battery from their pallets of access to their full suite of mobility options grappling hook stim etc similarly tendons have access to all of your loadout to be able to kill this gaping pilot we did bring back Electric smoke from titanfall 1 as a

universal tool that all tenants have access to once they hit a 20% charge in the attack or meter length so it takes about 5 seconds or so to steal the battery and from there it's variable as to whether or not the battery should covered similarly although 410 fault - we didn't initially set out to solve explicit design goals when iterating on rodeo it's useful to reexamine the goals we had before to see if they're still met so the first goal still intact arguably the aspect of doing heavy damage is weakened since each row does is at most one chunk of damage as opposed to the unlimited amount of potential damage that time fall 1 rodeo had however the ability to give batteries to Friendly's as well as the Catamounts aspect of 10 fault to rodeo makes this goal I think overwhelmingly accomplished intent all to his favor and the second goal is intact as well pilots need to leverage their skills at traversal to get away from Titan and tenon's need to use two skill and hunting pilots to get the most out of the rodeo experience and we think the third goals also accomplished although one could probably argue the visual

presentation for 10 full ones rodeo is stronger and more compelling shooting at the brains of Italian feels more compelling than a more abstract stealing a battery sequence the grenade version of rodeo does help with this however and the last goal is arguably where we gave up the most compared to the previous version of rodeo a battery is an abstract concept despite the lengths we go to make it more grounded it does help that we have a single-player campaign to slowly teach the player the concepts so we'll call this and make success lastly it's also instructive for us to re-examine what went well for rodeo and ten for one and see if those are still applicable to ten for two and see if anything to see if anything new was added to the list at this point in time it's maybe a bit too premature to comment to comment about whether it's popular or well balanced there are some feedback even internally as well about people who missed the feel of time for one style rodeo and that's certainly - certainly to be expected when you make a big change to a prominent mechanic but my hope is that over time people will prefer this new style of rodeo fantasy fulfillment

admittedly the concept of you pulling out a battery is weaker from a fantasy fulfillment aspect compared to shooting the brains of Italian so it's kind of unfortunate we took a step back in that regard the organic interactions of the tiny eject system were preserved from time for one so that's a win for us in fact more parts of the game started to have richer interactions with rodeos cheese component so we think this was a big improvement over all Brody also felt much more improved and richer since the pilot now has a strong supporting role previously with mainly the Titan in supporting the pilot by fairing the pilot or hardpoint etc going down the list let's see if we improved what went poorly last time around the back and forth between the Titan and pilot feels better this time around for the most part we got rid of the Titan player feeling like they had to disembark to shoot the pilot off I think that's an improvement especially from the fantasy fulfillment aspect of David versus Goliath the chase component of rodeo is mechanically richer and offers more room for counterclaim than an old version of rodeo since the amount of time the pilot is on the back of the Titan is minimized there's just less pressure for us to

create tools for the time to get the pilot off their back aiming during rodeo this is generally improved because the position in which the pilot climbs on for brodeo is higher than 10 for one which makes it slightly easier to aim it's still not easy and they'll probably always be limited how good we can but overall I think there's a noticeable improvement so these two pictures just show the improvement we're talking about the picture on the left is ten for one and the picture on the right is ten fall to notice how much more of the screens real estate is taken up by the tenants body in the left screen shot lastly the problem of being able to tell the glance whether you can rodeo attendant is still there but the situation is less of a problem than before since rodeo normally only has two enemy pilot on the back of the tank fall about about five seconds or so admittedly a Titan of a buddy on him can still be hard to tell the clans but other changes that we made for example the enemy high lighting system should hopefully help with this as well so one interesting development about rodeo that we had for time fault too was the need to have different behaviors for the single-player campaign versus the

multiplayer this was somewhat regrettable but ultimately necessary to best serve the needs of the game type and multiplayer only pilots can pick up a battery to apply a battery to a Titan it either has to be done via rodeo or by a pilot climbing into his own time an SP though we allow you to pick up one by as a time by simply walking over it and there are three main reasons for having this extra limitation in multiplayer first it doesn't encourage teamwork a bit more between pilots and times on the same team if the timing could just walk over a battery there's less reason for you to need to depend on your teammates the second reason is to give an element of counter play and risk when reward if there are no friendly pilots around the 10 player has to disembark to pick up a battery and then re-embark to apply that battery this is the process that takes time and makes the disembarking pilot more vulnerable it also makes mid combat pickups of batteries less likely which helps makes the fights between titans be a bit more controlled lastly there was a general desire on the MP team to make tenants lost just a bit shorter in a battle of you compared to ten for one

and making it a bit less convenient to pick up the batteries to step in that direction these reasons though aren't really applicable in SP so we just may tend able to walk up pick up batteries by walking over them there's some other subtle differences like the amount of Health and shield that the battery application gives you but those are relatively minor so we've gone on a trip journey of how rodeo was conceived its various implementations through the time for one and while you made the changes we did 410 fault - before we end the talk however there's a other bits and pieces I'd like to talk about for the design of Road that didn't quite fit the mainly chronological nature for the rest of the talk the first of these things I like to talk about is the trigger condition for adieu and by that I mean how does the player initiate rodeo the very first iteration of rodeo had pilots automatically magnetized onto tightens been jumping near them there's no extra button input needed in part this was done all of a simplicity to get the simplest thing possible to play test idea of rodeo this automatic activation had a divided response some players enjoyed the ease

of which it happened but others hated it how sometimes it happened even though they wanted to jump away from the Titan instead I was very resistant maybe unreasonably so to the idea of having rodeo trigger only when the use button was held down since I thought it was an unnecessary barrier of execution this is especially so for consoles where you'd be asking the players who had their thumbs on the look stick to move it to the jump button and then to use the whole button it just feels clunky we did eventually try out a jetpack assist ability for pilots which involved them using the use button and being propelled towards the tank they were looking at at this stage of development tendons were a little too fast at getting around the map then this was done in part to help make rodeo a little easier and to respond to suggestions that having rode to be triggered by a button press we make it more interactive and more immersive in the final shipping game for technical one however the trigger conditions were really remained very

similar to when it was to halt was initially implemented with it happening automatically when you're jumping near a Titan I feel like this is one the reasons why rodeo is so successful because it's easily done and even naturally discoverable and learn about you could conceivably stumble upon it without anybody telling you what rodeo was and it would hopefully make immediate sense to you in time default to this is largely unchanged although we did adjust the angles and the height required to get frontal rodeo to start the idea behind this is that it's often frustrating from the tiniest perspective that you see a pilot in front of you they jump you try to punch them etc and instead of the pilot exploding and the glorious palo jibs they disappear and start rodeo instead and some of this is caused by latency and it's kind of hard to solve so we just made where do not trigger for the pilot when jumping straight on towards Titan personally I kind of dislike this instance can actually turn very quickly especially on PC so what started out as a pilot trying to jump onto a titans back can quickly turn into a time facing the pilot directly and the pilot getting stomped at attendants feet that's it though we're going to be monitoring clears feedback on that to see if they

prefer that frontal rodeo is harder another thing I wanted to talk about with some of the counterplay options we tried in the development of rodeo ie what options at the time we have to get the pilot off their back as I went through the various iterations of rodeo in ten for one you may have noticed they didn't really seem to be any new ways we added for the 10 to remove the pilots off their back it was always just disembark electric smoke and to be honest this is this isn't because we didn't try it's just that all the things we did try it left something to be desired here I'll talk about some of the few interesting things in the category in this category that we tried that didn't ship so wall smashing the inspiration for this came from this fight team and the presses in the Princess Bride I'll be wearing them the future this forgive me so much why is that so we had an idea that the tanker could use their - ability to RAM themselves into a wall doing damage to the pilot and she came off so it took multiple dashes to

shake off a full health pilot which meant that the ogre of the smallest amount of dashes had the hardest time getting rid of a roadie player we tried versions when the pilot player just got shook off with it and took damage dying but that meant that he could just jump back on again but then will be made it fatal it became frustrating for the pilot player because it was hard for him to tell that the tanker was going to be running into a wall at a high enough speed to throw him off all in all just kind of clumsy as the mechanic sure we'll see what it looks like from the pilots perspective is a tiny tries to shake him off so you can see it's not very easy to fall along with what's happening wired hood this was a kit that could be equipped the idea was that the panel design was booby-trapped so opening it would cost the pilot to be shocked and thrown away so the problem with this was that rodeo

pilots had no way of knowing beforehand that the Titan had equipment worried hood so let the players just assuming that every Titan had the wiring hood on and brodeo just happening a lot less as a result the studio service among you would probably notice that the electric smoke that we shipped in the final game has a lot of the same problem is that you can't tell 10 has it before it's used but since electric smoked had other uses and wasn't specifically designed only for rodeo we kept electric smoking active reload so before we brought back Electric smoke 410 fault - we tried implementing an active reload style minigame for rodeo the idea was that if the Titan managed to get the timing down perfectly it'd be able to push the pilot off without having its battery stolen the bars coming up hits it correctly at the green part and then the pilot is successfully thrown off without stealing a battery we used to try diversion where the pilot had to do the minigame correctly to be able to steal the battery ten employers

definitely liked the idea of being able to push off the pilot without them stealing the battery but it proved really hard to communicate to the pilot what was going on the pilot didn't know they were getting pushed off because the tenant succeeded in a minigame and even if we displayed the bars above Titan and pilot to both players it proved really confusing there's latency and there's prediction issues which made it hard for us to show accurately if the other player managed to do the minigame correctly and on the higher level it kind of felt like a bit of a step back and that literally was a mini game that temporarily temporarily changed part of the controls for Titan pilot the response of this was not positive enough to outweigh the negatives and so we eventually cut it one last thing I wanted to show is the idea of having multiple spots for rodeo we actually tried this idea at multiple times at different points in the project but I'll just show you footage of the latest prototype of it so remember they're one of the largest persistent frustrations of rodeo is that there's only one spot available in the back of a Titan and sometimes you can't tell this already another pilot on it when you're trying to do your own rodeo an obvious thing to try to fix this is to allow multiple players to be able to jump onto a Titan so we tried making tents of multiple

climbing spots eat instead of pilots always climbing automatically to titans back we let them climb to the spot nearest to where they jumped out so here's the video of how mortal spot rodeo worked so note that the player can climb around freely in different parts of the time and that he can insert the battery once he gets the correct spottin back so the ability to climb to different spot was important because we only allow the battery to be stolen on on the back of the titan and there's a few reasons why we did this let us give a subtle reward to players who doing rodeo correctly by jumping from the back since they wouldn't have to spend time to do the climbing animations to get to the back it also let us prevent rodeo for being instant death to a Titan when there's four enemies jumping on the same time and lastly really wasn't practical for us to design the times of Malta battery ports are all over the Titan either one awesome moment that this gave us was for rodeo pilots to shoot off enemy rodeo pilots

so unfortunately although there are definitely cool moments the complexity cost we're having multiple spots rodeo is just too high to justify keeping it extra cool moments you get by shooting off an enemy rodeo attempt or multiple people being ferried by a single timing they just happen to infrequently for us to justify having to make the players learn the extra complexity of having to understand which rodeo spot you're on to have to remember to look what other people wrote in the same time etc antenna fall one we were just introducing the idea of rodeo which is a mechanic most games don't really have an equivalent for you can't afford for the mechanic to be too complicated for time fault too if we didn't make the changes with the battery system it might have been okay to add the multiple spot rodeo since we could depend on people having played ten for one and we could leverage the single-player campaign to introduce extra complexity but you can't really do both the battery system and the multiple spot system together as it would confuse even players to the first game so we're

nearly at the end of the talk now but before I leave here are some lessons we learned from working on rodeo some of this is pretty common sense but I think there's still worth explicitly stating especially for any budding designers out there they're just starting out first start fast and start simple the very first prototype of rodeo I showed you was really simple about his baseline implementation you can get for the purposes of testing on a new idea but from that simple idea you can already identify the central issues of rodeo that would plague the mechanic all the way up to launch and beyond I also note that we didn't over plan an idea before starting to implement it don't write a 10-page document detailing every single subcase and problem you can think of before trying to implement it instead just try out the simplest version you can that contains the essential components of the idea you find out so much so quickly from actual play testing you'll be able to identify the things you actually need to fix improve on I suppose to just potential problems also note that when you're trying to sell a new mechanic or concept to others it's much easier if they can see a rough

version of the concept in game as opposed to a multi-page document that nobody really wants to read second point add as little as you can to make the idea work so there's a favorite quote of mine from Antoine de saint-exupéry the author of the little prince that goes like this perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add but when there's nothing left to take away as you can see from the top we tried a lot of things of RO do that eventually didn't end up shipping rudia wouldn't actually have been better if we ended up shipping all those failed ideas it would have been too confusing too weird and too unfocused when you're working on a new mechanic making sure that players understand what's going on heavy and that they have fun doing it there's probably a higher priority than making it a mechanic that is super deep and balanced ideally of course it's going to be both but don't hesitate to make sure it's fun and understandable first before you're trying to make it deep in balance third point advocate for both sides this is kind of only really applicable for multiplayer games but when you're designing to make mechanics it's important to make sure you're advocating for both the player using the

mechanic and the player is being used upon it would have been very easy for us to fall into into the trap of making rodeo mechanic focused only on the pilot one way the pilot could just straight-up destroy the tank but instead by making sure that both the tiny and the pilot had their own defined role in the mechanic they both have choices and counter choices we made rodeo mechanic that is deeper and more fun for both and this isn't to say that you can't have mechanics that are easier for one side or another but you know in theory rodeo should probably be at least a bit in favor of the pilot since they have to get up close to the tank to do it it just means that you want to give the time at least some feeling of hope that they can influence the outcome if they play well instead of just being handed a death sentence last point don't be afraid to make big changes as I mentioned rodeo is pretty popular in time for one and when we first started making changes to ten fall to the battery stall rodeo there's definitely some feedback that they prefer the old-style rodeo from ten for one it's important to not flat out ignore the feedback of course but it's just as important to Annette to not let all your design to let all your decision-making

be ruled only by reactions to feedback take a step back calmly analyze what it is you're trying to do and see if it's actually achieving it in rodeos cases it was initially driven by a need to make rodeo work within the confines of the health chiclet system but once we realize once we started playing with it we realized just how huge an impact being able to give batteries to your allies was having a chase component to rodeo also made so many more abilities and weapons play into rodeo in a much more interesting fashion so although I was responsible for a lot of the design and implementation of rodeo across both painful and for two it would be remiss for me to not point out that Rhoda was clearly not the work with just one person it takes an entire team of dedicated professionals to bring game mechanics to life so let me just take some time out now to thank all the folks back at respawn for the help on rodeo and for this talk special thanks in particular to go to a designers Macky McCandlish Brent McLeod Carlos Pineda programmers Steven Juan Cole comfort and animators Paul measuredly mark Grigsby Bruce fairies and Laura thief special thanks also go

out to our awesome community in particular the youtube channels from whom i lifted videos for this talk from Voland cog incorporated average Willis Joseph Hanratty 11 Bravo gaming Colin Vesper and oxo fire EXO last but definitely not least all the Phantom players out there all of us at respond are incredibly lucky to have so many people care about our games and I hope our games bring you some joy and happiness and if that becomes the end of the talk thank you all for listening my name is Jin Chang Chong you can reach me at channel respond comm I have some time for questions now if anybody's interested [Applause] hello great game and great speech yeah so first question was about how long would your iterations take for the major iterations and secondly how would you

collect feedback did you do surveys or just around as a group and so on nutrition state and feedback so um our company since do weekly play tests like uh sorry let me rephrase that the design department internally played us all the time like basic everyday we play the game and then every Friday we have what what we call Friday Night Fights which is design like basically bringing a more polished stable version of the game on to the entire company and we you know we tell people hey these are the new things that we added and these are we would like feedback on these these systems tell us what you like tell us what you liked or didn't like about them you get emails we talk in person about them and you generally get a sense of that yeah cool all right since you guys said that they over an initial game had maybe a weakness to rodeo since the Atlas dashes were there any considerations in this time fall to that rhodium was a kind to affect each type of Titan differently so it does actually in fact each sorry the question is this time rodeo in time fall to effect each time differently and it actually does because um in ten fall - even though we got rid of the hell

Chiclets specifically like each person each role each time still has like a chunk like they divided the Parsons like five sections for example for the yeah the ogre has five sections and rodeo only does one section of damage so the ogre is more resilient to rodeo in that fashion and take more reduce to actually bring him down to like through health all right thing was anything that you can share about your dev process on iterations that helped increase the speed at which you could go through those iterations I'm sorry it's the question is about the iterations yeah so it was anything that you could share about your dev process that helped you get through those iterations faster and understand be able to quickly like whether this idea was gonna work or not tips for generally increasing iteration speed I guess like making sure you know exactly what you're testing for and like it's very common to just be like hey I put this new thing in tell me what you guys think guys but like um it's better than more targeted feedback especially from players you trust like for

designers in special in we asked so what do you think about this mechanic does it increase the teamwork element no this what do you think it has is on this other mechanic that we have in the game like what do you think oh that the spillover effects and you ask people people that you trust that aren't just you know like randomly gonna say what they feel without really thinking about it but also people you know who aren't going to be afraid to tell you things you don't want to hear if they tell you it sucks you should listen to them and try to fix that yep cool thanks hi I was just wondering looking at all those different iterations of rodeo I was just wondering is there a favorite version that you had to cut that you have a favorite version over oh I had to cut ah at the UH no technical one I was actually pretty happy with what we ship for for rodeo in ten for one like I said I I think I think it was a nice balance between being cinematic easy fun and accessible I am kind of sad we didn't keep the wall smashing thing but those

kind of comes yeah like if you if you saw the video like it's hard to tell what's going on when you're being shipped check around so maybe if you had somehow managed to find a more graceful solution to that that would have been good but yeah thank you and I guess that's it so two things please remember to fill out your feedback forms one and second my very talented co-worker Carlos who's in the audience he's going to be giving a follow-up talk about ten combat in this room right Nick's so stick around for that if you're interested thank you