Titanfall 3 Cancelled for Apex Legends: Report

If you were hoping for Titanfall 3, think again. It appears that a sequel to 2016's Titanfall 2 has been cancelled in favour of Apex Legends, EA's battle royale competitor to PUBG and Fortnite. Apex Legends launched this week for the PS4, Xbox One, and Windows PC without as much as a hint from publisher EA or developer Respawn and it seems that while Titanfall 3 was in development, this is no longer the case, with Apex Legends taking its place. Tragic when you consider that the first game's multiplayer was superlative and the second game's campaign was superlative. If Titanfall 3 combined the best of both, it would have been fantastic. However this is not to be.

"The world thinks we're making Titanfall 3 and we're not - this is what we're making," said Apex Legends Producer Drew McCoy in an interview with Eurogamer. "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."

Furthermore, Kotaku who has been accurate in the past, states that Titanfall 3 was cancelled for Apex Legends.

"What was once Titanfall 3 has become Apex Legends, the free-to-play battle royale game that launched today," writes Kotaku's Jason Schreier. "In other words, a third Titanfall is not currently in development, despite the critical acclaim for the first two."

This was followed up by Schreier elaborating that according to his source, "third Titanfall was under way and that the studio was looking to get it out as quickly as possible, for fear of it looking and feeling dated if it came out too much later than 2018 (thanks to its use of the Valve-created Source engine)."

He speculated that either Apex Legends would be "a stopgap en route to a proper Titanfall 3" or "whatever work was done on Titanfall 3 has become Apex Legends" turns out EA and Respawn opted for the latter.

Why Apex Legends does not have titans?

Apex Legends is missing some of Titanfall's most iconic features such as titans, wall-running, and double jumping. Respawn claims that they would break the game's balance.

"When we started [Apex Legends] we were building off Titanfall 2, and we didn't know we weren't going to have double jump or wall running or titans," he tells Eurogamer. "The choice to not have those came about because of play-testing against our goals: to have a strategic, learnable, masterable, deep game. 

"[We had] things like wall running and double jumping for a long time, we had triple jump for a while, they make combat really hard to beat and comprehend. You can't predict where players come from or you're pushing them to, and things would happen to you more than you would predict and respond against. So it's really fun to do, but it's really bad for combat legibility."

"The titans in Titanfall 1 and 2 were meant to be a power fantasy - you're supposed to think 'alright, I can call it in, I can power it up and feel like a bad-ass for a little while', then it'll probably blow up and you have a chance to do it again. 

"So we were prototyping that and they were a power-up, and that was really detrimental to a battle royale. Battle royales are supposed to be like Poker - everyone comes to the table with the same possibilities."

"If we ever balanced a titan down to where they were not a destructive force on the match - it was like betraying that power fantasy, like they were made out of paper, a wet cardboard bag - it was not worth it."

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