How Titanfall 2 Will Try to Ensure Its Players Stick Around This Time

Among the ways Respawn is attempting to expand the longevity of Titanfall 2's multiplayer scene is with something called Networks.

This feature has been alluded to over the past few months but never detailed in full; Respawn simply described it as something that makes it "easy to play with friends old and new."

Today, we learned it plans to do this through what amounts to a sort of clan system. You create a Network (which can have at least a few dozen people in it) that players can join, either to group up with friends or to find like-minded strangers to play with. Networks can be labeled in different ways to indicate whether its priorities are on competitive or casual play, for instance.

Players can join more than one Network at a time, so you aren't limited to selecting a single group you want to associate with. The idea is to give you a smaller pool of people to associate with than what you would find through simple matchmaking.

The overall goal is to help ensure we don't see a repeat of the original Titanfall, where many players loved the game but left it in droves shortly after launch, making it difficult to find a match (particularly on PC). Attempts were made to lure players back in by offering DLC for free and adding a Horde-style mode, but it was too little, too late.

Titanfall 2 already has a leg up in a few ways. For one, the potential player base is much larger now than it was at the time of Titanfall 1's launch, at least on consoles. Perhaps more importantly, there won't be any premium DLC packs to divide up the audience. Respawn has also talked about the strides it's making with matchmaking, which should now get you into better matches and do so more quickly.

Following the reveal of Titanfall 2's campaign last week, we learned today more about its multiplayer. Meanwhile, the upcoming beta begins later this week.