Developer Respawn has confirmed that Titanfall 3 is not currently in development.
This comes despite reports that the recently announced and released FPS battle royale Apex Legends would be a stopgap from Respawn while they continued to work on the next Titanfall.
Respawn producer Drew McCoy put it pretty simply to Eurogamer during a press event for Apex Legends, saying “The world thinks we’re making Titanfall 3 and we’re not – this is what we’re making.”
He continued, explaining why the game was announced and then released so soon after:
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 sounds just a little bit like McCoy wasn’t entirely happen to not be making Titanfall 3, going off of these comments. Could the decision to sack off Titanfall 3 for a free to play battle royale have been more to do with EA?
McCoy swiftly shut that idea down, telling GameInformer:
Not to be throwing EA under the bus, but this wasn’t the game they were expecting. I had to go to executives and show it to them and explain it and…not convince but more ‘Hey, trust us! This is the thing you want out of us.’
Kotaku had previously reported that the game was in development back in 2017 when EA acquired Respawn, but that the game was starting to look dated by modern standards, meaning Apex Legends was created as a stopgap while Respawn changed engines for the next Titanfall.
Unfortunately, it now looks like whatever work had been done on Titanfall 3 has become Apex Legends. That’s not to say the new battle royale is a bad game, to be clear – but Titanfall 2 had such a good campaign.
Respawn are also currently working on the story driven Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. After that launches, maybe Titanfall 3 could become a reality once again.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.