In an interview with The Burnettwork published on YouTube, an ex-developer at Respawn Entertainment by the name of Mohammad Alavi has made the claim that their team was 10 months-deep into developing Titanfall 3 before the project was cancelled, ultimately in favour of producing the successful battle royale set in the same universe, Apex Legends.
The former level designer at Respawn, who was famously responsible for some of the industry’s favourite Call of Duty missions, said that while the improvements over Titanfall 2 that the studio had made by the 10-month mark were only incremental, they’d produced new tech, multiple missions, had a playable build, but then battle royal fever hit and the team decided that the better move was to pivot entirely to what would become Apex Legends, rather than release a sequel that wasn’t a revolutionary step above what was offered in Titanfall 2.
Mohammad Alavi’s full comments, as transcribed by MP1st, are below:
“Titanfall 2, you 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. 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, you 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.
“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, you know, Titanfall 3 classes.
“And at the time, I had just literally become narrative lead designer on Titanfall 3, I had just pitched the… story, the whole game, that me and Manny had come up with, made this big presentation and then we went off a break and went back from break, and we talked about it, and we were like, “Yeah, we need to pivot. And we need to go make this game.” ‘Cause we literally cancelled Titanfall 3 ourselves ’cause 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, which is clearly amazing.” And don’t get me wrong, I will always miss having another Titanfall, you know what I mean? I love that game, Titanfall 2, like I said, is my most crowing achievement, but it was the right call. That is a crazy cut. Such a crazy cut that EA didn’t even know about it for another six months!”
