It appears that Respawn Entertainment was much more into development with the next Titanfall than we initially thought. In an interview with a YouTube channel called THE BURNETTWORK, ex-Respawn developer, Mohammad Alavi, states that Titanfall 3 was well into progression for “10 months.” Alavi then stated that the project was eventually canceled to put more focus on their other IP, which would end up becoming Apex Legends.
According to Alavi, Titanfall 3 was a big upgrade from its predecessor, but wasn’t going to change the video game market by any means. “We worked on Titanfall 3 for 10 months in earnest. We had the tech for it, and multiple missions going. But I’ll make this clear, it was incrementally better, it wasn’t revolutionary.” Alavi also mentioned that during the development a prototype for the multiplayer was created in order to change things up and bring the title to another level of competitiveness. Apparently this ignited a spark for an entirely new IP, that eventually became Apex Legends. “We came back from break and we talked about it, and we were like ‘we need to pivot,'” he said. “We literally canceled Titanfall 3 ourselves because were like ‘we can make this game and it’ll be Titanfall 2 plus a little bit better, or we can make this thing which is clearly amazing.'”
The desire from the Titanfall fan base for another entry has been well documented. This has only been further emphasized by more recent news and tidbits such as Alavi’s interview. We also learned earlier this year that Respawn Entertainment President and CEO Vince Zampella mentioned that he would love to see Titanfall 3 become a reality, but that the studio has “no exact dedicated plans for that.” He went a bit further on the subject, specifically with the aforementioned Apex Legends, which seems to be the main IP for the studio at the moment. Once again, it doesn’t look like Respawn is anywhere close, or will be anywhere close, to another Titanfall game.