Respawn Entertainment, makers of Titanfall and now Apex Legends is not developing a Titanfall 3. The developer revealed and released the free-to-play battle royale Apex Legends today, which takes the place of a more traditional Titanfall game for the foreseeable future.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Respawn Entertainment’s Drew McCoy broke the news about a more traditional Titanfall sequel. McCoy, the lead producer on Apex Legends, said, “the world thinks we’re making Titanfall 3 and we’re not—this is what we’re making.” McCoy went on to give a rather frank answer to why the game was shrouded in secrecy until launch.
“Our desire is to be completely open and transparent with our player base, and part of that expands to how we talk about problems, and we understand this game is gonna have a skeptical audience. There are some people who think there are too many battle royale games or it’s a fad. […] To try and convince a skeptical audience for months with trailers and hands-on articles, we’re just like ‘let the game speak for itself’—it’s the most powerful antidote to potential problems. We’re doing a free-to-play game, with essentially loot boxes, after we were bought by EA, and it’s not Titanfall 3. It’s the perfect recipe for a marketing plan to go awry, so why have that? Let’s just ship the game and let players play.”
It’s nice to see the developer be so open about why Apex Legends isn’t Titanfall 3, but it’s still a sour taste for fans of the series. Unlike the Titanfall games, Apex Legends has no wall-running and no Titans while still being set in that universe. McCoy said these mechanics were in the game for a long time, but ultimately were cut from the gameplay. McCoy said, “the choice to not have those came about because of play-testing against our goals: to have a strategic, learnable, masterable, deep game.”
Now that Apex Legends is out in the wild, people are wondering if we’ll see a proper Titanfall sequel in the future. While both games were critically successful, the second failed to meet high sales expectations. That could be partially related to its release—sandwiched between EA’s own Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Whatever the reason for the shift, Respawn will continue supporting Apex Legends into the future while they finish development on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order which is expected to release this year.
