Titanfall will finally be getting a sequel with a single-player campaign and a possible TV spin-off – though fans will have to wait just a little longer to get their hands on it.
In an interview with Forbes Magazine, lead writer Jesse Stern explained that the Respawn Entertainment team is a “little past a year into” development, and “sometime late this year or early next” is a good time to expect Titanfall 2 – which lines up with distributor Electronic Arts’ promised launch sometime in fiscal year 2017 (spanning from April 2016 to March 2017).
Stern had a futuristic and insightful outlook for what the sequel is inspired by, telling Forbes:
We are doing our best to deliver a vision of grand global colonial warfare – retelling the story of the American Revolution and the American Civil War in space. We imagined the next generation of immigrants moving out to the new frontier of an inhabitable planet. Rather than taking a traditional sci-fi approach to that, we wanted to look at how that would happen practically, what the ships would look like and with machines that were designed for excavation and construction, demolition and working the land, and what happens when they are turned into instruments of war.
The team at Respawn is inspired by “the junction of technological advancement with the inevitability of conflict and war and what the next war might look like.”
Stern, a former NCIS writer and producer, also spoke of missing “the daily buzz of working on episodic TV,” and mentioned a partnership with Lionsgate TV to turn Titanfall into a TV series – the biggest factor holding them back thus far, he explained, is the cost of such an endeavor. It’s not with a lack of support, however – Respawn CEO Vince Zampella has also shown interest in scripted and animated TV series.
With the original Titanfall clocking 10 million users, Respawn Entertainment has the resources to make game with both single- and multi-player campaigns – in fact, the lack of a single-player campaign in the original was something that received “overwhelming community feedback.”
The sequel’s development was confirmed last March, and is expected to be multi-platform release. Respawn has done a remarkable job of maintaining long-term player support in Titanfall – the company released three DLC map packs within the year after launch, and made all DLC maps permanently free to players on the game’s one year anniversary.