All signs point to EA announcing a brand new free to play Titanfall battle royale spinoff from Respawn today (Monday, February 4). The announcement will be immediately followed by release, according to reports.
The game is called Apex Legends, and its existence was first reported by YouTuber The Quartering, before esports consultant Rod Breslau took to Twitter to share more details.
Breslau said that the game will be available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and will boast multiple classes/heroes with unique abilities, up to 60 players per server, and three player teams (known as trios) to work together in battle.
Being a spinoff, the game apparently won’t feature any of the Titan mechs that we know and love from the “proper” Titanfall games, but it will run on a modified version of Valve’s Source engine (which was the case for the last two Titanfalls)
On the thorny topic of microtransactions and loot boxes, it sounds as if the game will adopt an approach similar to Overwatch. Though being a free to play game, Apex Legends is less likely to ruffle feathers with loot boxes than a full priced game such as Battlefront II.
Kotaku verified these reports via its own sources. They’ve heard that it plays like a mixture of Titanfall, Overwatch, and the Blackout battle royale mode from the latest Call of Duty.
The Kotaku report goes on to suggest that Repsawn had actually been working on Titanfall 3 (as had previously been claimed via various sources), but the game was starting to look “dated” as a result of running on the modified source engine as the previous two games.
As a result, the choice to switch engines for Titanfall 3 was apparently made, resulting in the creation of Apex Legends as a stopgap to keep us going now the next core Titanfall has been delayed.
On Sunday night, Respawn’s CEO Vince Zampella took to Twitter to confirm the existence of Apex Legends (though not any of the previously rumoured details. He said we’d learn “everything” about the new game during a Twitch livestream at 4pm GMT today.
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.