A job listing at Respawn Entertainment, the developer behind Titanfall and the battle-royale spin-off title Apex Legends, is calling for a senior director with “multiplayer FPS experience” to lead a team on a title that’s incredibly early in pre-production right now. It’s no confirmation, but my unruly heart has already decided that this is Titanfall 3 and so we must do everything to ensure that it happens now.
The post offers precious few details on the project, which is to be expected, but it does seem like Respawn Entertainment will be returning to its multiplayer roots for whatever this project shapes up to be. Though it has obviously been developing and supporting the live-service multiplayer title Apex Legends since 2019, Respawn has otherwise been too occupied making a string of licensed single-player hits for EA to double down on what put the studio on the map.
We know that Titanfall 3 was being developed for a full year before it was eventually canned and repurposed into Apex Legends. Now I’m holding out hope that nearly ten years after the last true Titanfall game, EA has wised up to the popularity of the series and puts out a new one for everyone who has had to settle for Apex all these years.
Since the bungled launch of Titanfall 2 in 2016, Apex has been the only multiplayer FPS that the studio has released. In 2020, it also put out Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond on VR, and has become known in the last several years for its highly successful single-player Star Wars: Jedi series. This eventually led to Respawn becoming EA’s go-to Star Wars production house.
That hasn’t stopped Respawn from trying and failing to get back to developing FPS titles. It was in the middle of developing a supposed Mandalorian-based Star Wars FPS before a round of layoffs at EA forced the team to shutter the project. Besides that, the team has often tried to return to Titanfall too, including another canceled project that would’ve been a single-player Titanfall game, and the studio’s co-founder Vince Zampella talks and thinks about the series so often it hurts.
I think it’s entirely true that Respawn could simply be too busy between Apex, a third entry in the Jedi Survivor games, a Star Wars strategy game, as well as whatever project Steve Fukuda’s small team is working on to be able to feasibly resurrect Titanfall. Chances are that this posting could be for a design director to help out on future installments in either of those series that Respawn is already balancing between three huge internal studios. But unlike many others, I don’t believe anything is truly dead, and certainly not Titanfall. As EA and Respawn consider future moves, especially as the live-service bubble continues to burst, I pray they make the call we’ve all been waiting for.