Former Titanfall designer Mohammad Alavi has revealed that Titanfall 3 was actually in development for quite some time before Respawn decided to pivot into developing battle royale game Apex Legends.
“Titanfall 2 came out, did what it did, and we were like ‘OK, we’re going to make Titanfall 3‘. And, we worked on Titanfall 3 for 10 months in earnest. We had the tech for it, and multiple missions going,” Alavi said on The Burnettwork while talking about his career.
According to Alavi, development, while still early, had gotten far along enough that the studio also had playable versions of Titanfall 3. Alavi describes these early versions as “good, if not better” than what Respawn had worked on before. He did, however, state that the improvements were more incremental, and it wasn’t really bringing anything new to the franchise.
Alavi talks about seeing the success of the then-new PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and the studio deciding that it needed to pivot into developing a battle royale game of its own.
“We came back from break and we talked about it, and we were like ‘yeah… we need to pivot’,” Alavi said. “We literally cancelled Titanfall 3 ourselves because we were like ‘we can make this game and it’ll be Titanfall 2 plus a little bit better, or we can make this thing which is clearly amazing’.”
While calling Titanfall 2 his “crowning achievement”, Alavi states that the team pivoting its efforts into working on Apex Legends was the right call for the studio.
Back in April, Respawn boss Vince Zampella stated that, for the team to work on a new sequel to Titanfall, it has to be the right project at the right time, and that it doesn’t really make sense for the studio to work on a sequel just for the sake of it.