Respawn Entertainment was hard at work on Titanfall 3 for 10 months before the project was canceled so that efforts could be focused on Apex Legends, a former developer at the studio has claimed. Speaking to The Burnettwork, former Titanfall and Call of Duty designer Mohammad Alavi said that the game was well into development before Respawn pulled the plug on it.
“Titanfall 2 came out, did what it did, and we were like ‘Okay we’re going to make Titanfall 3,” Alavi said (via PCGamesN). “We worked on Titanfall 3 for 10 months in earnest. We had the tech for it, and multiple missions going. But I’ll make this clear, it was incrementally better, it wasn’t revolutionary.”
Alavi added that in the end, a combination of the multiplayer team struggling to make the multiplayer mode accessible and the battle royale genre finding explosive success pushed Respawn to enter that genre. A prototype was made, company-wide interest was ignited, and the studio began working on Apex Legends. “We came back from break and we talked about it, and we were like ‘we need to pivot,'” Alavi said. “We literally canceled Titanfall 3 ourselves because 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.'”