Former Respawn designer Mohammad Alavi has revealed new details about Titanfall 3’s development. It was “incrementally better, it wasn’t revolutionary,” he said.
Given the widespread adoration of Respawn’s surprisingly-athletic-mech sequel, Titanfall 2, the news earlier this year that a sequel was in development, but was cancelled, was particularly hard to take.
In a new interview with YouTube’s The Burnettwork (which comes to us via Kotaku), former Respawn designer Mohammad Alavi has revealed some more details about the cancelled Titanfall 3. The shooter sequel was, Alavi says, in development “for about 10 months.”
“We had new tech for it, we had multiple missions going, we had a first playable which was on par to be just as good if not better than whatever we had before.”
Alavi added, however, that the sequel was proving to be “incrementally better” than Titanfall 2, rather than “revolutionary.”
“We were feeling pretty decent about it,” he continued, “but [it wasn’t] the same feeling as Titanfall 2 where we were making something revolutionary, you know what I mean?”
It was around this point that the Titanfall 3 team, having spent some time playing PUBG, decided to see how its battle royale framework might work with Titanfall’s nimble traversal mechanics. Thus, what would become Apex Legends was born, and Titanfall 3 was quietly set aside.
Said Alavi, “We literally cancelled Titanfall 3 ourselves because we were like, ‘We can make this game, and it’s going to be Titanfall 2 plus a little bit better, or we can make this thing [Apex Legends], which is clearly amazing.'”
For fans of Titanfall, the prospect of an “incrementally better” sequel would probably still be better than no sequel at all. Still, we can at least console ourselves with the thought that Titanfall 2′s fluid traversal lives on in Respawn’s own Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.
You can see the full interview right here – it’s well worth a watch:
