Following the news that Electronic Arts had canceled Respawn Entertainment's Star Wars FPS, there are reports that the studio is working on a new game set in the Titanfall universe.
Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb revealed on the Game Mess Mornings show what he's heard about the new game, which he insists is not Titanfall 3, as many are hoping.
“There are always conversation about Titanfall 3. Whenever I do look into it, they’re not making Titanfall 3, they just straight up aren’t,” he said. “They do have another team that has been kicking around a skunkworks project, that was in very early [prototyping]. There’s different phases of prototyping, there’s a very early, very small team prototyping phase, and now they’re going to go to a wider, like this is a real project now, but still in the prototyping phase, and that has happened with that game, and that is from the director of the original Titanfall."
The original Titanfall and Titanfall 2 game director is Steve Fukuda. Respawn boss Vince Zampella revealed to Axios last year that the "skunkworks" team, led by Fukuda, was on a mission "to find the fun in something new."
According to Grubb, the game is a Titanfall game, in the sense that it's set in the Titanfall universe. But he reiterated it's not Titanfall 3. Unfortunately, he couldn't elaborate much more because he simply didn't have the details.
“This game, as it stands today, as far as I understand, is a ‘Titanfall game’, it’s in the Titanfall universe. But everyone I talk to keeps saying, well it’s not, don’t get in you’re mind that it’s Titanfall 3, like a game with online multiplayer and a single-player campaign. I’m like, well wait, what, then how is, what is this game? I still don’t know.”
There were reports that Respawn was previously working on a single-player game set in Titanfall/Apex Legends universe codenamed Titanfall Legends. There was a team of about 50 people working on it, led by creative director Mohammad Alavi. But last year, Bloomberg reported that EA had pulled the plug on the game.
Because of this, Grubb finds it unlikely that EA would go back and make a Titanfall 3 game.
The original Titanfall was released for Xbox and PC in 2014. The multiplayer first-person shooter saw players control Pilots and their mech-style Titans in six-on-six matches set in the outer space colonies of the Frontier. A sequel to the game was released in 2016 and while the core concept remained largely the same, Respawn expanded on it by introducing a single-player campaign and improving them multiplayer experience with more modes.
The success of Titanfall 2 didn't lead to a third game, but instead, a free-to-play battle royale shooter called Apex Legends, which launched in 2019. Apex Legends is set in the same universe as Titanfall but the gameplay is far different.