Electronic Arts didn't cancel Titanfall 3, Respawn did—and it didn't even tell EA for six months
Titanfall 3 is simultaneously a sad tale of what might have been, and an undying dream of what may one day be. It's widely known that the success of the nominally Titanfall-based battle royale Apex Legends is what ended its planned development, but in an interview with The Burnettwork, former Call of Duty and Titanfall designer Mohammad Alavi said it wasn't EA executives chasing a trend who made the decision to pull the plug—it was the Titanfall 3 dev team.
Respawn worked on Titanfall 3 «in earnest» for about 10 months, Alavi says in the interview, and had a «first playable» build on the go. But the multiplayer team was apparently struggling to address issues from the first two games that Respawn believed kept them from really catching fire.
«People love Titanfall 2 multiplayer,» Alavi says. «But the 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 of it fast. They're like, 'That was a great multiplayer, [but] that's not something I can continually play for a year or two years.»
The arrival of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds changed everything. Members of the dev team started playing it, and being suitably impressed by the experience, put together their own battle royale-style map using Titanfall 3 classes. That led to a sudden, sharp resurgence in Respawn's «Friday Night Fights» playtest sessions. But only for the battle royale mode: Sessions for the standard Titanfall multiplayer modes still had trouble attracting players.
«I had just literally become narrative lead designer on Titanfall 3,» Alavai says. «I had just pitched the mission that me and Manny
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