EA Didn't Cancel Titanfall 3, Respawn Did; Team Hid the Information for 6 Months

We know that Respawn Entertainment currently has no plans for Titanfall 3. The team was working on the third part of the series, but it was abandoned. Now a former studio employee, Mohammad Alavi, talked about the history of the project in an interview with The Burnettwork channel.

1. Work on Titanfall 3 lasted for ten months before the game was abandoned.
2. Interestingly, contrary to what many fans believe, the decision to cancel Titanfall 3 was not made by Electronic Arts. It was decided by the developers themselves.
3. Titanfall 3 was at a stage of work that already allowed the devs to play an early version of the game. However, they had problems with the concept of multiplayer. As Alavi explains, players loved the online modes in the previous two installments, but it was a relatively small group of people - the brand could not attract crowds and the developers did not know how to change that.
4. Their beliefs were changed by the release of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. Developers from Respawn fell in love with the game and decided that the battle royale mode was what could make Titanfall a mainstream hit.

The explosion in popularity of battle royale was the turning point

So the developers quickly made a battle royale map for Titanfall 3 and the entire studio started playing it, ignoring all other modes included in the project during testing.

1. The developers realized that Titanfall 3 would simply be a slightly better version of the second game.So it was decided that it would be better to focus only on battle royale, and so the game Apex Legends was born.
2. Studio's owner Electronic Arts wasn't happy with this decision. Titanfall 2 failed to live up to expectations, but it was still a $60 game that sold millions of copies. The proposal to abandon the sequel in favor of a separate project using free-to-play model was risky. On top of that, EA bought the team specifically for Titanfall, so abandoning it was not received well.
3. To make matters worse, the studio's management hid the change in concept from EA for six months. The publisher only found out about it when Respawn had a prototype ready.

In the end, the developers' intuition turned out to be correct and Apex Legends became a huge hit. It's just a shame that it came at the expense of Titanfall 3. The head of Respawn Entertainment, Vince Zampella, however, does not rule out the creation of a third installment in the future. He warns, however, that the series will return only when the developers have the right idea for a third game and there is the right time to make it, so we are unlikely to count on the quick creation of this game.