New TITANFALL In Development for All Platforms — And TV
Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall 2 will be a while arriving.
Forbes reports that the sequel was started in late 2014 after the game company had spent six months adding content to the first Titanfall. Now they’re developing what lead writer Jesse Stern promises to be a world that’s “grounded, dirty, human and real” where science and magic intersect.
No release date from Electronic Arts, which leads to speculation it could arrive sometime in fiscal 2017 (after April 1st). Stern says, “We’re only a little past a year into it,” adding, “It takes two years to make these things usually. Sometime late this year or early next seems like the right neighborhood.”
Stern also says to expect more device compatibility with this new entry into the franchise. “The multi-player game will be even better than it was the first time around. The first game was an Xbox exclusive. This one is going to be widely available, I believe on all platforms. One of the shortcomings of the first game was we just did not have the mechanism to tell everyone ‘here’s who you are, here’s where you are and who’s around you.’ We knew all the answers, we just could not deliver it.” Titanfall eventually was available for other platforms.
The new game is described by Stern as a retelling of both the American Revolution and the Civil War in space. It involves the next generation of colonists on a frontier planet. Contrary to the traditional designs for science fiction machinery, Titanfall 2 looks to develop practical designs for the machinery — not only the spacecraft, but also the excavation and mining equipment a the other machinery used to build a colony — and then re-purpose that civilian machinery for war.
Stern, who first started writing video games with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, also is a television writer, and has credits that include NCIS and several unsold pilots.
That television experience has him also developing a Titanfall TV project with Respawn and Lionsgate TV. “What I love about TV is the tempo,” he says. “Every day you are collaborating with other writers, working with your cast and crew and your studio and the network. You come up with an idea, you pitch it, you sell it, you shoot it, cut it and edit it and come up with another one.”
Respawn Entertainment CEO Vince Zampella also wants to diversify the company into television. The most challenging obstacle for a Titanfall series will be cost. “It would be very expensive,” he says. “We are trying to find a way to tell a story in the worlds we want to be in and produce in the TV model.”
