It’s amazing how much can change in the span of two years. When Titanfall came out in the spring of 2014, it was the first triple-A game to eschew a traditional single-player campaign for a multiplayer-only experience. I suggested that it’s success would cause other games to go that route, though Evolve and Battlefront were the only noteworthy games to take this approach to middling critical reviews.
Two years later, Respawn is starting to divulge details of Titanfall’s sequel and it looks to be dropping for the format it pioneered. The devs say that Titanfall 2 will have a single-player campaign to tell its story.
If you didn’t play Titanfall, the game had a story campaign but story missions were multiplayer matches where there was story happening but the narrative was only played during gameplay so it wasn’t your focus. The fact that you would bounce between the game’s two factions between maps as the game rebalanced teams probably didn’t help either since there was supposed to be a narrative for each faction but you couldn’t follow it through from one side. I’m still not convinced I played all the story missions for each faction.
The folks at Respawn realize that there was a problem with the story telling in the original game. In an interview, lead writer Jesse Stern admitted that Titanfall “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.”
The solution is to tell the story in a traditional single-player campaign. Details on what would be in the campaign and how it would pick up from the original Titanfall’s story were not disclosed. Stern did admit to drawing inspiration for the story from the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Interestingly, there are plans in the early stages of developing a Titanfall TV series with Lionsgate TV. Apparently costs will be the make or break factor for the project going further ahead.
Also exciting for gamers is that Titanfall 2 is due for release in the second half of EA’s fiscal year. That gives it a launch window of October 2016 to March 2017. It’s also been reported that the Xbox console exclusivity of Titanfall was only for the first game and that Titanfall 2 will be available for PlayStation 4.
Sources: Destructoid, GameSpot
