Hey folks, bryonato AND zweek here today to
announce our new collaborative tutorial series. [a]We’re combining our creative brains to
produce what we hope will be the best educational content Titanfall 2 has seen, beginning with
this, the ULTIMATE guide to moving around in Titanfall 2. Why am I making ANOTHER tutorial?
Well, Titanfall 2 has naturally progressed a lot as a speedgame, and I didn’t like
how the other two videos were split up, so here we are. Let’s keep this intro short
and get right into it: First things first, this video is a movement
tutorial focused primarily around Titanfall 2 speedrunning, but the large majority of
tech you’ll learn here is applicable in multiplayer as well.[b][c] This video also
is focused around PC movement, but again, a good portion of it will still apply to console,
and I’ll be sure to notate specific differences. Titanfall 2 runs on a heavily modified version
of the Source engine, which means we have several holdovers from other Source games
like airstrafing and bhopping, which we’ll cover later in the video.
The main thing I want you to remember when it comes to movement in Titanfall 2 is that
everything influences everything. Titanfall 2 is a movement based speedgame which is based
and routed around momentum preservation. Getting up to high speeds in this game takes a lot
of skill, and preserving it arguably takes even more. The goal for this video is to have
a comprehensive piece on nearly everything related to Titanfall 2 movement, so naturally
there will be a LOT of content covered here, and my advice to you when it comes to digesting
it all is to take things piece by piece, and you’ll notice that the video is structured
to accommodate that. If you start getting overwhelmed, just slow down a bit, and tackle
things one at a time. Before we even start moving, you’re gonna
want to make sure your keybinds are optimal and comfortable. Generally speaking, you wanna
stay away from straight default binds. It’s really common for runners to bind things like
crouch or grenade to a mouse side button, some [d][e][f]top runners even have jump on
right click.[g][h][i] If there’s any one of these you should rebind, it’s grenade,
as holding Q while also trying to maneuver with WASD doesn’t mesh super well. There’s
arguably no super optimal way to do these binds, but I suggest doing some experimentation
to find your comfort zone here. Another helpful tip is to change crouch from “toggle”
to “hold.” This one can be a little weird, as they’re separate binds for the same mechanic,
rather than an option you toggle on and off. I strongly recommend switching to hold crouch.
And before you ask, no, you cannot bind scroll to jump or movement binds in this game. Titanfall
2 specifically requires these inputs to be held for at least one tick for them to register,
unlike Apex, so binding scroll to jump or using a custom config or macro to set +forward
is off the table (and banned), and it’s better this way. And for you controller players
out there, use evolved. Every high-level controller runner uses evolved.
Alongside bindings, I’m also going to suggest you lower your mouse sensitivity. The majority
of camera movement in Titanfall 2 is going to be slow and smooth with some flicks here
and there, so I suggest a lower sensitivity. I myself run on 650dpi, 2.0 in game sens.
If that seems way too slow for you, or maybe you don’t have a ton of space to move your
mousepad, try 800dpi 2.5 in game, which is what I used for a very long time until I dropped
it even further. I understand that a lot of folks these days, especially those of y’all
that sweat competitive FPS games, already have pretty low sens, so this might not even
be necessary for you! Alright, so we’re gonna work from the ground-up
essentially here over the course of this video. Let’s get started with slides and hops.
The main mechanic that’s going to contribute to our ground-based movement is sliding. Sliding
occurs when we hold crouch travelling at basically any speed faster than walking, so around 15kmh.
Once we’re over that speed threshold, we’re going to get what’s called a “slideboost,”
where we actually gain speed momentarily up to a certain cap, which will then slowly dissipate
the longer we slide. It’s most common to initiate a slideboost out of a sprint or a
sprint jump, as both easily get us over the threshold.[j]
Now, you can’t just sprint-slide sprint-slide over and over, as there’s what’s known
as the “slideboost timer” in effect in this game. The slideboost timer will prevent
us from getting another slideboost for around 2 seconds after the initial boost, so this
is something you’ll have to take into account when you’re trying to get back up to speed
after a mistake. However, it is possible to preserve the momentum
we get from a slideboost. The most basic form of higher-level movement in Titanfall are
slidehops. A basic slidehop can be performed by initiating a slideboost, and then jumping
every time you touch the ground while keeping that crouch input held. Assuming you’re
timing your jumps correctly, this allows you to maintain a decent level of speed for very
long periods of time. Keep in mind that the longer you slide, the more speed you lose
every time you hit the ground. You’re only going to get that one slideboost at the beginning
of a movement string, so preserving that momentum is the name of the game here. etting the feel
for this is going to be key to a lot of movement strings in the game, so I recommend having
a minimal grasp on it before we move on. You can also do traditional bunnyhops or “bhops,”
like in other Source games. Bhops are considerably more niche than slidehops, and are falling
a bit out of favor due to modern day prevalence of halfslides and extended slides (covered
later)[k][l], but they’re still a good tool that you’ll want to have in your kit. Bhops
occur when you jump immediately after touching the ground from a standing position during
a movement string. The timing for it is much, much tighter than slidehops, but they do have
some benefits. 1. Bhops occur from a standing position, which
means you naturally gain more height than a traditional slidehop since you’re jumping
from a higher vertical position. 2. Bhops can allow for a bit tighter turns
and routing due to the high friction and slowdown that occurs when you touching the ground from
a standing position. Let’s move on to the largest and deepest
aspect of Titanfall 2 movement: air strafing. Just like other Source engine games, air strafing
is a massive part of this games’ movement. There’s obviously a lot of math and calculations[m][n]
that go into EXACTLY how air strafing works, but let’s break it down into the simplest
definition that gets the point across clearly. Air strafing is based on the concept that
you go farther and move faster by subverting the speedcap that you normally experience
when you hold forward by holding left and right as you move through the air. If you
pay attention to the input overlay,[o] you’ll see that I’m specifically holding A and
D as I move through the air and pairing that with turning my camera at a specific speed.
What air strafing allows us to do is very simple, but also very powerful: move in a
curve through the air. We can use this to turn corners, clear otherwise impossible gaps,
navigate through tight hallways, etc. You’ll notice some differences with strafing
in Titanfall 2 if you’re coming from other Source games. The air acceleration value in
Titanfall 2 is much lower than say, Half Life 1 or 2, and because of that we’ll be strafing
a lot slower in this game, most of the time at least. This means that if we move our camera
too quickly, we’ll actually lose speed instead of gain it, so learning the proper speed to
move your camera at is key. My advice: watch how other runners do it (like in this video)
and learn through trial and error. So how do we incorporate strafing into some
of the tech we’ve covered already? If you’ve never done any strafing in other games before,
it’s normal for air strafing to feel very unintuitive when you first give it a shot.
The easiest way to begin incorporating strafing into slidehop strings is to do it step by
step. Try sprinting, jumping, then holding left or right and slidehopping in a straight
line. This will allow you to get a feel for holding left and right while jumping. Once
you’re comfortable with that, try moving your camera in the direction you’re pressing
in a slow curve; this is air strafing in its simplest form.
When you want to switch strafe directions in the middle of a slidehop string is when
things get more complicated, and this is the first example of movement being different
whether you’re on controller or keyboard. You’ll notice a lot of straight-line movement
in Titanfall 2 involves strafing back and forth in a slaloming pattern,[p] as is the
best balance between having a tight line from point A to point B and generating speed via
strafing. Aside from the actual strafe angles themselves, the input timing is the most important
thing in these movement strings. The correct timing to swap input directions occurs either
right before you land from a jump or during the moment you land itself. Why do you have
to swap at this point? Well, technically, you could swap directions earlier, but then
you would incur what is known as STRAFE LURCH. Strafe lurch is one of Titanfall 2’s most
interesting movement quirks, and one that really separates it from other Source games.
Strafe lurch is a small, but jarring “lurch” that occurs [q]when you press a movement direction
within .4 seconds after jumping. We’ll spend a lot of time later going over how to harness
this, but for the moment let’s talk about the main downside: Strafe lurch causes you
to lose speed[r]. This is why you need to wait to input strafe directions during slidehop
strings. If you were to swap directions directly after jumping, you’d be taking small movement
speed penalties every single time. And as a note before we continue, I want to stress
that strafe lurch can occur after EVERY jump. This means wall jumps, double jumps, slidehops,
everything. The only time that lurch DOESN’T occur when we go airborne is after a slide
or fall from a ledge. That said, we actually have tech to prevent lurch at every juncture,
which again, we’ll cover later in the video. As I mentioned earlier, strafe lurch is the
biggest difference between strafing on a keyboard and on a controller. Controller does NOT incur
strafe lurch, ever. This is because directional inputs are coded differently depending on
whether you’re using digital inputs to move (keyboard keys, face buttons), or analog inputs
(joysticks). You could do some binding shenanigans for controller on PC where you bind keyboard
keys to the d-pad or paddles, which are digital inputs, but traditional stick-strafing is
always going to be lurchless, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Moving without lurch,
for free, is a considerable boon to controller movement, and allows controller players to
move in ways that keyboard players have to work harder to emulate. It also means, unless
you do the d-pad/paddle bindings I mentioned, you can’t take advantage of lurch. To be
crystal clear: Controller players, keep this in mind whenever I’m talking about using
lurch or preventing lurch. You prevent lurch for free, but you can’t take advantage of
it unless you do specific binds using controller on PC, so console cannot take advantage of
lurch at all. So how do you harness strafe lurch, and how
do you avoid it? Let’s talk about the two most straightforward variants of it now, and
we’ll cover the rest later. TAP STRAFING is arguably the most straightforward
way to take advantage of strafe lurch. Like I mentioned earlier, we can’t strafe very
fast in Titanfall 2, which means things like quick 90 degree turns are a non-starter. However,
tap strafing allows us to use strafe lurch to do exactly that: quick, sharp turns with
minimal speed loss. It vastly expands our navigational abilities and will undoubtedly
become one of the most important tools in your kit. So how do we do it? Tap strafing
is performed by rapidly tapping forward during a strafe. We can stack multiple lurches during
the window that strafe lurch occurs, so by strafing left or right and tapping forward
several times, we’re essentially lurching at a 45 degree angle multiple times over[s],
and these rapid lurches allow us to achieve the tight turns. The easiest way to get the
hang of this is by beginning a slidehop string while strafing left or right, and then tapping
W after one of the hops. You’ll immediately notice the lurch and will be given an idea
of how this can be used throughout the run. The number of times you tap will always be
dependent on what the route requires. There are dozens of routes and strats throughout
the game where I use 1, 2, even 3 or more taps if I can[t] manage, and you’ll learn
this as you go. Now let’s talk about a practical way to
AVOID lurch. There are many scenarios where we want to avoid lurching to maintain more
speed or keep a better line, and the blanket term for tech that facilitates this is “no-lurch”
or “lurchless”[u] tech, you’ll hear both of these terms used interchangeably.
From here on out we’ll be covering the lurchless variant for a tech whenever we introduce it,
but for now let’s begin with the most beneficial one: Lurchless double jumps.
The basis of what lurchless double jumps allow us to do is fairly simple to understand. It
allows us to double jump without incurring lurch, which means we can spend more time
strafing and prevent any speedloss from lurch. A traditional double jump input would look
something like this: jump, strafe, release strafe, press forward, jump, release forward,
and press strafe again. See the issue here? We’re spending a considerable amount of
time not strafing AND incurring lurch when we strafe. So how do we prevent this? As you’ll
see throughout the video, generally speaking, lurch occurs when we PRESS an input, and no-lurch
tech occurs when we RELEASE an input. It’s always going to be a button press that incurs
lurch, so if we can strafe without pressing keys, that’s how we’re gonna avoid it.
To perform a lurchless double jump, you need to press the strafe key OPPOSITE to the direction
you are already holding and double jump at the same time as that keypress. So if you’re
strafing left, press right and double jump at the same time, and vice versa. Again, you
want to press the jump key at the same time that you press the opposite directional key,
then release a directional key to keep strafing. If this sounds confusing, reference the input
overlay for a better understanding. You can use this to either swap strafe directions
or maintain your current one. This will inevitably feel really weird at first, but trust me when
I say this is the most important variation of this tech to understand. Obviously you
want your double jump & strafe key presses to be as fast as possible, because when you’re
holding both left and right at the same time, you’re not gonna be strafing at all, and
that execution speed will come with time and practice. A small note, you can also use a
similar input order to prevent lurch during slidehop strings, which allows you to change
direction without waiting to hit the ground again after a slidehop. If you can believe it, we actually made it
this far in the video without talking about walls and the many ways we interact with them
in this game, incredible stuff. Wall tech is very important and we have like, a hundred
different ways we can touch and jump off them. Let’s begin with a general overview of the
“rules of the wall.” Nearly anytime you approach a wall, with few
exceptions, your camera will tilt slightly and the player viewmodel reaches a hand out
to touch the wall. This is described as the “lean-in animation,” and will be important
for some tech we’ll cover later on. There are only two scenarios in which you
can grab the same wall that you’ve just jumped off of:
1. You can regrab a wall if you touch it at a lower vertical point than the initial jump
from it, and; 2. You can also regrab a wall if it has a
curve to it, specifically one of 25 degrees or greater.
You’ll see several strats throughout Titanfall 2 that make use of exploiting these rules,
[v]and we’ll cover some specific ones later. Some other quick notes: you can wallrun on
a wall for 1.75 seconds before the game kicks you off it, and the speed of a wallrun caps
out at around 28-30kmh depending on a couple factors, with a regular wall jump giving you
around a 10-11kmh speed boost at max wallrun speed, and lastly you always have to be holding
forward to wallrun.[w] With those rules covered, let’s dive in.
The first thing we’re covering here isn’t exactly a piece of tech, but more so a general
philosophy around strafing following a wall jump; I’m talking about what’s referred
to as the wall jump arc. When you jump off a wall, you’re sent at a diagonal angle
away from it. The wall jump arc refers to a strafe back toward the direction of the
wall you jumped from, which naturally takes you in an “arcing” pattern and provides
the most speed and straight-line distance following most any jump from a wall. If you
pay close attention, you’ll see the wall jump arc all over the place in Titanfall 2
speedruns, especially for tricks that require clearing long distances following a wall jump,
like Kill Room Skip. This is a great place to talk about the first
bit of lurchless wall tech: Lurchless wall jumps. I mentioned earlier that no-lurch tech
is performed by releasing keys, rather than pressing them, so how does that apply here?
During a wallrun, press the directional input that faces in toward the wall you’re running
on, and then jump from the wall and release the forward input. Pressing in toward the
wall doesn’t cost you any speed while you’re wallrunning, and releasing the forward input
means you can begin strafing nearly instantly after the wall jump without incurring lurch
and losing speed. This prevents lurch because you’ve essentially pressed the strafe key
early while attached to the wall where the input doesn’t affect you, and are able to
begin a strafe by simply releasing the forward input you were using to wallrun. This is a
super easy tech to learn with lots of uses all over the run, and it plays into some other
wallboost tech we’ll cover later. Now let’s talk wallkicks. Most of the time
when you interact with a wall, you’ll want to jump from it instantly rather than running
on it for a long period of time. An instant jump from a wall that results in a net speed-gain
is called a wallkick, and for being such a simple tech on the surface, there is an incredible
amount of depth behind it that we’ll attempt to tackle here. Let’s go over the basics:Titanfall
2 runs at 60 ticks per second, which means the game essentially updates itself 60 times
in a second. A wall kick must occur within the first 5 ticks of touching the wall, and
the faster you perform the jump input after making contact with the wall, the larger the
boost you’re going to get, with the fastest of these being a 1-tick wallkick, referred
to commonly as a “firstie.” It’s possible to do a fast wall jump and maintain your speed,
but a wallkick usually specifically refers to when you gain speed following an instant
jump from a wall. Though, you’ll hear the term used pretty loosely among runners when
generally referring to jumping off a wall as fast as possible.
An easy way to help yourself get acquainted with wallkicks is to use the lean-in animation
I mentioned earlier. This is a super telegraphed animation that lets you know almost exactly
when you’re going to touch the wall, and a lot of top runners, myself included, develop
wallkick muscle memory based on this animation in conjunction with just visually looking
at how close they are to the wall itself. Wallkicks are also extremely dependent on
the angle you take on approach to the wall, as well as the direction you’re looking
when you make the jump input. For the fastest wall kicks, you want to have the most shallow
angle possible as you approach, while also looking in the general direction that you
want to jump. You can see from the video here just how stark the difference is on sharp
vs. shallow angles. The key to adjusting and tuning these angles as you approach a wall
is largely dependent on your strafing, both in how you take advantage of lurch and work
around it. The angle you’re facing as you jump plays a large role too, as it directly
influences where you’re travelling immediately following the jump itself, so looking where
you want to go is both intuitive and the correct play here. The difficulty in wallkicks lies
in consistency. There are dozens of routes in Titanfall 2 that rely on chaining multiple
wallkicks together in succession, and missing a single wallkick usually means you have to
completely adjust how you’re moving through that segment.[x] The most punishing and common
wallkick miss that you’ll see is early inputs. Titanfall 2 has no input buffer whatsoever,
so if you press jump even a hundredth of a second too early before you touch the wall,
the game isn’t going to give you that jump input, and the friction of the wall will quickly
bring your speed to zero. At this point, I would hope you’ve formed
the question in your mind, “ok bryon and zweek, how do we do wallkicks without lurching?”
Well I’m glad you asked, because it’s a big one. Keep in mind, this tech is arguably
a BIT advanced for a beginning player, but familiarizing yourself with it and its benefits
at a bare minimum can only benefit you in the long run, and don’t worry, we’ll get
back to some simpler stuff after this. So, no lurch wallkicks. No-lurch wallkicks are
commonly referred to as “strafe kicks,” and there are a number of different ways you
can input and perform them. Similar to lurchless wall jumps, strafe kicks are also going to
involve holding left or right into the wall before performing the jump input and then
releasing forward after the jump to strafe, however the input order and timing here can
vary quite a lot depending on what the route calls for and in some scenarios, what’s
comfortable for you. Simply put, a strafe kick requires three things: a directional
input (either toward or away from the wall), a forward input ( as you can’t gain speed
from a wallkick without holding forward), and a jump. The order of these two directional
inputs is largely determined by the context of the route and run. There are times when
I hold strafe into the wall, then press forward and jump, and other times when I hold forward
and press strafe right before I hit the wall. And just to reiterate, you want to release
the forward input as soon as possible after the wallkick to take full advantage of the
lurchless strafe you’ve acquired.[y] The timing for this can and will be tricky, as
oftentimes when you’re holding in toward a wall, you’ll find that the wall is a bit
more “sticky,” and holding away from the wall can cause you just not to grab it entirely.[z]
There’s an additional way to strafe kick that doesn’t suffer from either of the two
pitfalls I just mentioned, and it’s a tech that wasn’t really discovered or implemented
until the start of this year. Instead of holding JUST left or right before a wallkick by themselves,
you can actually hold both directions, kind of like a lurchless double jump. So yes, you
are holding 3 directions before a wallkick: left, right, and forward. This is called a
Neutral Strafe Kick, or NSK or “nisk”. It feels about as weird as it sounds, but
neutral strafe kicks are arguably one of the most potent forms of lurchless tech outside
of lurchless double jumps. Holding all 3 directions oddly means the game is reading it as holding
forward[aa], so you don’t get sucked into the wall, you don’t get shoved off it, and
you’re free to strafe either direction following the wallkick without incurring lurch. It’s
very potent and powerful, and this tech has actually allowed PC players to compete with
top controller times in the Gauntlet, which is normally a record that has been dominated
by controller play due to controller’s unique super smooth lurchless movement. This is what
I meant earlier when I explained that keyboard can do the same stuff as controller, but it
has to work harder for it. This is also where the direction you’re looking coming off
a wallkick is super important, because the entire point of NSKs is to maximize speed
gain at every possible juncture. Before we stop talking about wallkicks, there’s
one more strat I want to mention, and that’s what we refer to as “double wallkicks.”
I mentioned at the beginning of this segment that one of the “rules of the wall” is
that we can actually regrab a wall if we touch it at a lower vertical point than when we
initially grabbed it. Because of this, there are actually several strats in the run where
we take advantage of this rule. The general strategy behind a double wallkick is to do
a standard kick, then purposely lurch and strafe back into the wall, then kick again
once that lower vertical position is reached. It can be tricky, but with enough practice
you’ll find it to be a bit of a rhythmic type of input. While double wallkicks can
be fairly niche in their implementation, understanding them and how they work can have wide benefits
when it comes to improvisation or trying to find a backup for another route. The strength
in double wallkicks comes from the tight line they allow you to take, and the slightly unintended
paths they allow you to travel through an area, since most of the level design in this
game was based around jumping back and forth between walls.
Alright, so let’s tone down the tech a bit now with something that is much easier to
get a grasp on: Wall bumps. In Titanfall 2, you can’t crouch and wallrun at the same
time, so what happens when you approach the wall from a crouching position is that the
game gives you a visible “bump” off the wall, hence the name. You incur minimal speed
loss, and the bump actually refreshes your double jump. Wall bumps, despite being a slightly
more niche tech, can be implemented into routes in a plethora of ways. They are particularly
useful when navigating tight corridors on levels like Blood and Rust, where touching
a wall can completely mess up your momentum, and the fact that they refresh a double jump
opens up several routing opportunities. Additionally, if there’s ever a specific wallkick that
you’re struggling with, like the crane wallkick during Super Fastball for example, you can
sometimes substitute a wall bump into that route to make it even just a bit easier.
Now let’s introduce some tech that makes use of some stuff we covered earlier. We’re
going to explore EDGE boosts and END boosts here. These two forms of wallboost tech essentially
give you the same boost from different positions on a wall, making use of what is basically
coyote time as you leave a wallrun. If you aren’t familiar with coyote time, it’s
a decades-old mechanic in video games that exists to make platforming a bit more forgiving.
In Titanfall 2, and countless other games, there is a small moment when you actually
fall off a platform that you can still input and receive a jump. This grace period is the
“coyote time.” So how does that pertain to wallrunning and getting boosts from it?
The first instance we can talk about is an edge boost. An edge boost refers to jump from
the “edge” of a wall, usually a 90 degree corner or something similar. When you input
a jump during these ending ticks as you’re leaving the wall, you’ll get a speed boost
from the jump comparable to that of a wall kick. It’s worth noting that you can do
this input at any point during the “coyote time” and receive the boost, so for a maximized
edge boost you want to jump as late as possible. And circling back to the earlier tech like
I mentioned, the best way to maximize your edge boosts is to do them lurchless, and the
input for this looks exactly the same as the lurchless wall jump that we touched on earlier.
So if you know how to lurchless wall jump, you know how to lurchless edge boost, it really
is that simple! Hold in toward the wall during the wallrun, jump at the edge of the wall
as you’re leaving it, release forward and strafe.
END boosts give you a similar boost but at a different point in a wallrun. As mentioned
when covering the rules of the wall, you can only wallrun for about 1.75 seconds before
the game kicks you off. If you input a jump during the END of the wallrun, during this
period where the game is kicking you off, you’ll receive an end boost. The easiest
way to time this is to listen to the wallrun sound and time it with the camera gradually
tilting back to a straight up-and-down vertical position.[ab] The end boost angle is notably
harsher than any other wall tech we’ve covered, so keep that in mind when performing these.
End boosts are powerful, but come with the caveat of sitting on a wall for nearly two
seconds before you can take advantage of them. However, there are actually two different
ways you can FORCE an end boost to occur without waiting out this timer. This tech is aptly
named a Forced End Boost, or a FEB for short. To perform a forced end boost, you want to
look slightly away and press AWAY from the wall as you’re running on it. This will
force you to leave the wallrun, and, just like the strats previously mentioned, jumping
during the period in which you’re leaving the wall gives you a small boost. The boost
here is smaller than a traditional end boost, but still more than a regular wall jump. This
tech oddly isn’t possible on controller sticks, but that isn’t really an issue these
days, as the second, newer form of end boosting has more or less superseded the method that
we just discussed. The tech we’re about to cover here is all
the rage in the Titanfall world right now, it actually got discovered during the weeks
we were making this video, and it all relates back to pressing crouch and jump at the same
time when you jump from a wall or perform a wallkick.
Let’s start with crouched Forced End Boosts, or “cFEBs.” As we covered earlier with
wallbumps, you can’t crouch and wallrun at the same time, in fact, pressing crouch
while wallrunning immediately kicks you off of it. If crouch and jump are pressed at the
exact same time during a wallrun, we’ll receive a FULL end boost rather than the abbreviated
one we get with a regular FEB. Crouched FEB’s are very potent but do send you at that harsh
end boost angle I mentioned before, so you’ll need to take this into account when routing
around them, as having to correct your angle with lurch can quickly eliminate the speed
gains the boost gave you. Another note about cFEB’s, you DON’T want to hold away from
the wall before you perform these, as the away press seemingly out-prioritizes the crouch
press and will prevent any notable speedgain here. And yes, you can do these lurchless,
just hold into the wall like you would for a lurchless walljump before performing the
input. Before we get into the wallkick variation
of this, let’s tackle keybinds. Keybinds are vitally important to crouched wall tech,
as it is essential that the crouch and jump input occur at the same time. I personally
recommend binding space to jump and binding either C, V, or B to crouch, whichever is
most comfortable. This allows you to lay your thumb across both inputs and slap ‘em at
the same time with very high consistency. And no, binding crouch and jump to the same
key via any hardware or software is a macro and is very strictly banned for leaderboard
runs of Titanfall 2 (and competitive play, on that note). Some other binds top runners
have used with success are crouch and jump on the side buttons of their mouse, or crouch
on left click, jump on right click, space on shoot…. Yeah….
Ok, so, crouched wallkicks, aka “Crouch Kicks.” Crouch kicks were discovered by
gauntlet phenom Zetryox as early as July 2020, but weren’t fully realized until earlier
this year. This tech is brand new and has completely changed the way we look at movement
and routing in Titanfall 2. Mistakes are more forgiving, and EVERYTHING is faster. Basically,
Zetryox played an Apotheosis card on the entire Titanfall 2 community.
So with all that said, what are crouch kicks and how do they work? Crouch kicks combine
the speed gain from a wallkick AND an end boost into one potent piece of tech. By pressing
crouch and jump at the same time immediately after contact with a wall, a good crouch kick
can give you upwards of a 13kmh speedboost. Just like with wallkicks, the better the timing
of your jump, the more speed you get from the crouch kick itself. Oftentimes, it’s
beneficial to take a bad line through a segment to stack crouch kicks and generate more overall
speed. This tech is substantial because of the continual speed gain and forgiveness that
it allows. Usually at extremely high speeds, runners worry less about gaining speed and
focus more on momentum preservation. This changes with crouch kicks, as they provide
so much raw speedgain that continually building on your momentum is a much more realistic
proposition. As well, the crouch input basically eliminates missed wallkick punishes. This
is because the crouch input occurs before the wall friction has a chance to slow you
down, so generally the worst thing that happens is a wall bump.
I mentioned the jump angle an end boost gives you before, and that still applies here. Typically
after a crouch kick, you’ll find you need to course correct with lurch or overstrafing,
so you’ll find it’s a bit of a balancing act between gaining speed, preserving a decent
line, and minimizing speed loss. Like everything else though, it is possible to do these lurchless,
using the same input sequences as Strafe Kicks and Neutral Strafe Kicks. Where and when you
do this is largely determined by the context of the route and the run, as you need to account
for the end boost launch angle. With that, we’ve covered the bulk of Titanfall
2’s most essential movement tech. However, there are still several things we haven’t
even touched on yet. This next segment of the video is our foray into all the tech that’s
either very advanced, niche, or just didn’t have a good spot to include it anywhere else
in the video. This next piece of tech might sound familiar
if you’ve played Apex before, and it uses the same input sequencing as crouch kicks:
Superglides. They are somewhat different from Apex in that they require us to be within
a certain movement state. At very specific points of Titanfall 2, namely at the beginning
of BT and The Fold Weapon levels, we don’t have a double jump and have increased gravity,
which we’ll refer to as “grunt movement.” Jumping and crouching at the same time out
of a sprint in this grunt movement state will give you the jump as well as an instant slideboost.
For a superglide, you want to buffer a sprint input, then press jump and crouch at the same
time. This is generally most beneficial when coming out of a cutscene and regaining control.
You can hold sprint well before the cutscene ends, then press crouch + jump very briefly
after regaining control. They are another useful tool to accelerate really quickly from
a standstill, although its use cases are still very limited.
There are other ways we can take advantage of lurch outside of just tap strafing, and
they both play around with the idea of stacking lurches in different ways. Let’s begin with
tap strafing’s wacky cousin, Fzzy strafing. FZZY STRAFING, discovered of course, by fzzy2j,
is much more of a mashy type of strafing, as it relies on rapid single presses of one
particular strafe direction to achieve the lurched strafe. When performed properly it
can allow for some really strange and wild looking strafes, especially when you get into
territory like the TAS. Fzzy strafing is something you can opt for in place of tap strafing,
as they accomplish similar things, though fzzy strafing will usually cause a bit more
sharp speed loss. Fzzy strafing can be more comfortable for folks especially when travelling
at high speeds during segments like the Beacon 2 fan boosts. When learning this you may be
inclined to attempt to bind multiple binds to a strafe direction and alternate those
to mash, but as we’ll see with some other tech later, when you’re pressing two keys
that do the same thing, you cannot overlap them in Titanfall 2, otherwise it doesn’t
read the overlapped input, so figuring out a single key mashing style is important for
this form of strafing. SPAM STRAFING is kind of the middle ground
between fzzy and tap strafing. The name of the technique more or less implies what you’re
trying to do with it. Spam strafing involves “spamming” multiple strafe keys, either
in an alternating pattern, or at the same time[ac][ad], to achieve lurched strafes.
We’re reaching a point here where we’re covering multiple pieces of tech that do very
similar things, so denoting their differences gets tougher. There are scenarios where spam
strafing can save a tenth or so over tap or fzzy strafing, and vice versa. The inclusion
of these techs in this video is primarily to teach you what they are and how they work,
and from there you can choose how you want to incorporate them into your play. Spam strafing,
like fzzy strafing, is particularly potent when you need a LOT of lurch to maneuver in
the position you want in tight corridors and high speeds.
ALTERNATING TAPSTRAFING, or “Alt-Tap strafing” for short, is the most recent variation of
this subset of tech that takes advantage of how the game reads your input directions whenever
you press a button to lurch. If you hold a side direction and tap forward, you get a
diagonal lurch. The same thing applies when you hold forward and tap a side direction.
Alternating between these two by alternating forward and a side direction, making sure
that the inputs overlap, allows you to incur lurches that are practically identical to
regular tapstrafing, but at a potentially higher frequency as you’re using two fingers
to mash the directions. To be clear, inputs can overlap if they do different things, it’s
when you have two inputs that do the same thing where the overlap will cause you trouble,
as we’ll touch on more later. Yes, all of these lurch based strafe methods are more
or less the same thing, but they ARE different, and that’s why we’ve highlighted all of
them individually. Like many other games, damage boosts exist
in Titanfall 2. While there are various damage boosts that can be done to us by enemies and
the environment in the game, every damage boost that we can inflict on ourselves is
related to an explosion, and those will be the ones we’re covering here.
The biggest and most common form of damage boosting are called frag boosts, which are
of course performed with a frag grenade. There are MANY frag boosts that are routed into
the Titanfall 2 speedrun, and the majority of them are covered in the level-based tutorials
you’ll find for this game, and Zweek in particular, has a small video dedicated entirely
to this form of movement. We’ll cover the main points here, but you should absolutely
watch zweek’s frag boost tutorial as a bit of a companion piece to this video. Generally
when it comes to frag boosting, you need to find the balance between placing the grenade
in a spot that works into your route, and putting enough distance between yourself and
the frag so that the ensuing explosion doesn’t kill you. You can throw a grenade at some
wall or debris, at your feet, or swap weapons while it’s cooking to let it drop beneath
you, and all three have their own individual routing benefits and are used at different
points of the run. Again, check out zweek’s video on this, it is epic[ae][af].
Next we have EPG boosting, which you’ll recognize as being identical to traditional
rocket boosts in other games. The only issue here with the EPG is that the splash damage
will kill you if you shoot it too close. This, unfortunately, isn’t the multiplayer EPG
some of y’all may be used to. The multiplayer EPG does 90 damage, where the campaign one
does 110. Frankly, if you’re not running all helmets, you don’t really need to worry
about learning to EPG boost outside of the gauntlet, but it does have limited use in
Abyss chapter 3. The trick with EPG boosting is finding the correct distance to look behind
you and shoot to find that balance between the kill radius and the maximum possible boost.
This can only really come from trial and error and feeling it out as you go, and again, the
inclusion of this segment in the tutorial is less about giving you all the ins and outs
around it (because there are several), and more about teaching you that the tech exists
and giving you examples to reference. Softball boosting is the simplest of the boosts
we’ll see covered here. As of right now, the softball is used in the speedrun primarily
in Beacon ch.2 and 3, and is the main way folks do a trick called Kill Room Skip. Unlike
the previous two damage boost examples, a softball explosion WON’T kill you when you’re
at full health, which gives a lot more leniency and forgiveness around how and when you use
it. The way the softball works is pretty simple: you shoot a sticky grenade at a surface, and
after a brief delay it’ll explode. There’s actually a chance for there to be a .2 second
variance in when the softball explodes due to a “bounce” that can happen after it
hits a surface, but that very rarely impacts a run in any meaningful away, especially with
current Kill Room Skip setups and tactics. While it may not seem like a big boost, every
boost is gonna save you around a third of a second, and if you boost enough times, that
time adds up. The final bit of damage boosting covered here
is likely one you multiplayer folks are familiar with, especially if you’re a flag runner:
Gravity star boosting. Currently, the gravity star only has use in the Beacon chapter 3
for the Titanfall 2 speedrun, but nailing these boosts has massive timesave implications,
so we’re covering it here. Like the softball, a gravity star boost won’t kill you from
full health, thankfully. A gravity star always explodes roughly 3 seconds after it makes
contact with a surface. It slowly rises up a few feet above the ground and makes a “charging
up” noise before it explodes. You can use both the visual and audio cue to help you
time the boost. The trick here comes from how and where you choose to throw the star,
factoring in your current movement speed and the distance in front of you, since you’re
required to wait those 3 seconds for the explosion. A gravity star can give a fairly large boost
from a standstill or sprinting position, but generally you wanna be moving into a gravity
star at speed for the best possible results. There are very few points in Titanfall 2 where
we need to cover large amounts of vertical distance quickly, but for the times we do,
there is some pretty interesting tech we have at our disposal. Both of these next two techniques
are certainly niche, but they’re still new enough that their full routing potential likely
hasn’t been explored. First up we have spring jumps, a tech discovered
by zweek! A spring jump is essentially a really fast double jump from a standing position.
To be clear, you have to do this from a standing/sprinting position from the ground. You can’t do these
out of a wall jump, slidehop, or bhop. A spring jump is performed by inputting two tick-perfect
jumps in quick succession. The difficulty here comes from the fact that these two jump
inputs can’t overlap, so you have to press and completely release one input before the
next one. I have two jump inputs bound to help with this and other locations where I
just need another jump button for whatever reason. The difference between a regular double
jump and a spring jump isn’t massive, but it’s definitely noticeable. Zweek specifically
has a few places that he uses these throughout the run, but that’s about it currently.
Next, we have bump launches, which makes use of the wall bump mechanic that we covered
earlier. This routing potential of this tech was first really discovered and used by speedrunners
in the TAS, and so far we’ve found a single location that’s routed into the speedrun,
which ironically is the same location for both Any% and All Helmets even though they’re
different strats. A bump launch is performed by crouching in the corner of a wall, holding
a movement key in the direction of the corner, and mashing jump. As illustrated here, a bump
launch can cover massive vertical distances at truly unmatched speeds. This occurs because
the “bump” you get from the wall bump is being stacked over and over and over as
you touch either wall in the corner. Unlike spring jumps, it’s much easier to perform
bump launches using two fingers on one jump input. For me specifically, I alternate my
right ring finger and index finger on spacebar to get the fastest possible cadence. Finding
the right angle to perform a bump launch can be tricky, as some corners are more finicky
than others with the angle where it’ll work. In certain cases, like helmet 6 on Blood and
Rust, I use a visual cue to help me find the correct angle for the launch. Way earlier in the video, I mentioned that
bhops were somewhat falling out of favor due to the prevalence of extended slides and halfslides
being incorporated into runner’s toolkits. Let’s talk about those now.
An extended slidehop refers to when you extend your slide on the ground slightly before jumping
again during a slidehop sequence. When you jump repeatedly in Titanfall 2, your jump
height is actually reduced slightly on successive jumps. If you extend a slide, you essentially
wait out the period where your jump height is nerfed before jumping again, and the difference
is very noticeable. Extended slidehops have a plethora of uses all over Titanfall 2, both
as specific routing tools and as an improvisational weapon for when mistakes or reroutes are required
on the fly. It’s actually pretty easy to accidentally get an extended slidehop, which
more often than not can mess up your route due to the extra vertical height you get.
Halfslides are basically the middle ground between a slidehop and a bhop. While they’ve
been known for awhile, it’s only for the last couple months that their use has really
ticked up in the speedrun, primarily thanks to the efforts of Nextracer and AngrySpaceDorito
as well! A halfslide is performed by pressing the crouch button as you touch the ground
during a slidehop sequence. This essentially allows you to perform a slide from a standing
position. You’ll know if you did it right because the camera will do a sudden dip as
you enter the slide animation. You can chain halfslides into extended slidehops as well.
So why are halfslides useful? Halfslides are a surprisingly versatile niche routing tech
that can help in two primary ways: 1. Touching a surface that you would otherwise
overshoot. It is not at all uncommon to just barely overshoot a surface while trying to
maintain a slidehop sequence, especially in levels like BT-7274 that have a number of
high speed sequences with tight routing requirements. Halfslides allow you to extend your legs to
hit these surfaces without giving up the versatility and forgiving timing of slidehops.
2. Touching the ground earlier than you would otherwise. This second point is sorta the
same as the first, but with a different usage to highlight. There are certain points where
an earlier jump anchor point can mean that you manage to hit the route or line that you
want. Touching the ground earlier means you can change the trajectory of the subsequent
jump and land in a spot that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
The one thing that a halfslide does not do on its own is give you extra height, as you’re
still technically just performing a slidehop. The final bit of tech we’ll cover before
we show some movement string examples is Titan disembark tech. Due to routing and gameplay
requirements, we disembark from Titans a number of times in the speedrun. The first technique
we can talk about is disembark jumps. These have been largely routed out of the run, but
are still useful to learn if you wanna mess around with All Helmets. A disembark jump
is performed by pressing and holding jump during the ending of the disembark animation.
There are seemingly a number of different timing windows you can use for this, but I
like to do it when I see Cooper’s feet extend in front of me and push down on the lower
cockpit of the Titan. The resulting jump you get is pretty massive, and you’ll have a
double jump after it as well. A small note before we continue: the timing and animation
for this is completely different in multiplayer, so you’re on your own for that one.
And then we have disembark boosts, which are much more relevant to current strats. Disembark
boosts are performed by holding crouch and forward as you leave a Titan. The resulting
boost is extremely useful for getting up to speed following a disembark, and you can use
the same input sequences as you would for other no lurch tech to get a lurchless disembark
boost[ag][ah][ai]. These boosts have a number of uses in both fullgame categories and ILs.
Some common pitfalls to avoid are pressing crouch too early, which results in you just
kinda plopping out on the floor in front of your Titan, and disembarking on an angled
surface. For whatever reason, you can only get a disembark boost on flat ground, so be
careful of that. So crouch AFTER the disembark animation starts, and do it on a flat surface.
Now, as I mentioned at the start of this video, everything in Titanfall 2 influences everything
else. Whether or not you ate a lurch effects your slidehop routing for the upcoming segment,
the angle you’re looking at coming off a wallkick directly influences the necessary
strafe pattern, etc etc. Titanfall 2 movement is an ensemble performance and you need to
understand every aspect of the movement toolkit to perform at a high level and push the most
you can out of this game and your performance. We’re going to show you a number of movement
sequences that cover several examples of the tech we covered today in combination with
one another to illustrate how important every For those of y’all that made it this far,
thank you so much for watching. This was passion project for Zweek and I that we worked on
together for 4 months while trying to coordinate around German and Western US timezones which
wasn’t always an easy task. We went through a ton of effort to future proof this video
as much as possible and *hope* that it will be a sufficient resource from years to come,
or at least until Titanfall’s movement gets revolutionized again. I want to personally
give a massive shoutout to Zweek personally. While we worked on the video and brainstormed
edits and ideas together, he was the one that did the raw editing, and he did a fantastic
job. So thanks dude, I appreciate you from the bottom of my heart. Titanfall 2 is very much a speedgame that
is still evolving and getting faster everyday. We have a furiously passionate and inclusive
community built around it, and we have a lot of cool stuff in the works. If you’d like
to be a part of it or just watch more of it, be sure to follow Zweek and I on Twitch, sub
to us here on Youtube, and join our community Discord. All links will be in the description.
Until next time, cheers.
