Mohammad Alavi, former Infinity Ward and Respawn Entertainment developer, recently had an interview with The Burnettwork, where he revealed some behind-the-scene stories about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and the Titanfall series, sharing a never-before-heard story of Titanfall 3's internal cancellation at Respawn Entertainment.

According to Alavi, Titanfall 3 was in development for 10 months and the team had made serious progress, but the project was eventually turned into Apex Legends because of the battle royal explosion following the release of PUBG.

"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 10 months in earnest," Alavi explained. "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. But I'll make this clear: incrementally better. It wasn't revolutionary. And that's the key, right?"

Alavi then explained how the multiplayer team was struggling with player retention, saying "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," Alavi continues. "It's cranked up to 11 and they burn out of it fast. And they are like 'that was a great multiplayer, but that's not something I continually play for like a year, two years, three years.'"

While Respawn Entertainment was working to come up with new ideas, the surprise launch of PUBG and its incredible popularity widely affected the project. Some of the developers at Respawn Entertainment started to play PUBG and tried to implement some of its ideas into a brand-new multiplayer mode in Titanfall 3, the result of which quickly influenced the project and morphed into Apex Legends.

"Alex Roycewicz started playing PUBG, and then Geoff started playing PUBG. And then they made a Battle Royale map with Titanfall 3 classes," Alavi explains. "In Friday Night Fights I'd dwindle down to like 10 people, just bare minimum to get a match going to test things out. Just basically the designers and a couple artists, right? And then that came out and then the next Friday Night Fights was all 100 people, and they stayed until 9 pm playing it... it was that way for like two months."

According to Alavi, when the team came back from the holiday period, they agreed to cancel Titanfall 3 and begin working on a new battle royale project.



Posted: Jun 16, 2023 11:29 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/titanfall-3-cancelled-because-of-pubg/