Mohammad Alavi, a former developer at Respawn Entertainment, has said that the studio had a playable version of Titanfall 3 in development for 10 months before ultimately being shelved. This news isn’t the first time we’ve heard rumblings of a third entry in the Titanfall series, but the first we’ve heard almost a year’s worth of development was scrapped.
The news comes from an interview with the developer via The Burnettwork (thanks MP1st), where the cancelled project became the topic of discussion:
“Titanfall 2, y’know, came out, did what it did, and we were like, “Okay, we’re gonna make Titanfall 3,” and we worked on Titanfall 3 for… ten months, right? In earnest, right? I mean, we had, like, new tech for it, we had multiple missions going, we had a first playable, which was like, on par to be just as good if not better than whatever we had before, right? But I’ll make this clear—incrementally better, it wasn’t revolutionary,” says Alavi. “And that’s the kicker, right? And we were, like, feeling pretty decent about it, but not the same feeling as Titanfall 2 where we were making something revolutionary, y’know what I mean? And then the multiplayer team was having a hell of a time trying to fix the multiplayer because a lot of people love the multiplayer.”
A bit further into the discussion, Alavi continues, “People love Titanfall 2 multiplayer. But people who love Titanfall 2 multiplayer is a very small number of people. And most people play Titanfall 2 multiplayer and think it’s really good, but it’s just too much. It’s cranked up to 11, and they burn out a bit fast. And they’re like, “That was a great multiplayer, that’s not something I continually play for, like, a year, two years,” right? So we were like, trying to fix that, we were trying to fix that from Titanfall 1 to 2, trying to fix it from Titanfall 2 to 3, the multiplayer team was like, just dying. And then PUBG came out. *laughs* And I don’t know if you remember Alex Roycewicz but Alex Roycewicz was starting to play PUBG. And then Geoff started playing PUBG. And then they made a battle royale map with, y’know, Titanfall 3 classes.”
From the sounds of it, Alavi’s story indicates that once the team began playing battle royale games, the writing was on the walls for Titanfall. Add in issues with longevity for Titanfall’s multiplayer, and we can begin to see how the dots connect to the beginning of Apex Legends, one of the most played titles on Steam currently.
In related news, Respawn Entertainment cancelled a single-player project based on Apex Legends, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has revealed that Electronic Arts cancelled a game based on Titanfall and Apex Legends called Titanfall Legends.
