While it has been rumored for some time now, Respawn founder and CEO Vince Zampella has recently confirmed that Titanfall 2 is in development and will be released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
"So we're working on a sequel. No official name yet, but we're working on that. That's the main focus but we're starting up a second team and doing some smaller stuff too. Small, exploratory, taking it slow! It'll be multiplatform."
This is significant because the original Titanfall game was an exclusive for Microsoft products: Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Windows. But Zampella confirmed that the exclusivity deal is done and went on to describe how the original game wouldn't have been possible without that exclusivity deal with Microsoft. When asked in an interview with IGN about one thing they plan to change from the first game, Zampella expanded a bit further.
"I wouldn't have done it differently," Zampella explains, in reference to the multiplayer-only aspect of the original. "We set out to do it and it was one of our goals. I mean it obviously prohibits a certain group of people playing the game, and as content creators you want to get into as many peoples' hands as possible. We put some single-player elements in there though, and tried to mix it up. Maybe we could have mixed things up a bit better because some people blew right by it and didn't even see it because there was so much action happening around it. It's tough, because if you hit people over the head with it it becomes intrusive, and there are people who don't want or care about it. Where does the needle fall? I think it takes a while to figure that out and we haven't figured it out yet."
The original game featured the ability for players to control mech-style Titans that fight in six-on-six multiplayer matches. The battles are set in a space colonial environment with action combat the focus.
Up to 50 players can be active in a single battle, and features for each mech range from x-ray vision, invisibility cloaking, regenerating speed boosts, and ten customizable weapons.
As for an actual release date, Zampella nor any of the other staff at Respawn are saying a word in that regard, but rumors have been spreading based on typical announcement-versus-release timeframes and what the company has said so far.
Ecumenical News is saying that 2017 is the rumored year of launch, which doesn't sound too far off-base. Games like this usually take a few years to create, and it sounds like right now, since the game doesn't even have an official title yet, we still have a long wait ahead of us.
The original Titanfall released on March 11, 2014 after a three-year development cycle, and with more resources available after the success of Titanfall, we imagine that we won't have to wait another three years for Titanfall 2 to hit stores.
Plus, from this announcement of a sequel happening on the first anniversary, we can tell that anniversary dates are meaningful to the developer. Does this mean we could see the sequel launched around early March of 2017? That might be getting a bit too specific for such a long way out, but we wouldn't put it past them.
