An insider has claimed a cancelled Titanfall project was actually very close to completion, despite what others have reported.
A sequel to Titanfall 2 has been rumoured for years, but it always seemed unlikely after the last game failed to meet EA’s sales expectations.
The hopes of a sequel were recently stoked by prominent leakers for developer Respawn’s other shooter, Apex Legends, who claimed the next Titanfall game was an extraction shooter which was ‘almost complete’ and would be announced next year.
Other insiders refuted this idea, but the existence of another Titanfall project was thrust back into the spotlight when developer Respawn announced the cancellation of ‘two early-stage incubation projects’ earlier this week.
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, one of these cancelled projects was an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe, codenamed R7. ‘It was not close to being released,’ the report states.
Following the project’s cancellation, the two original leakers, Osvaldatore and Yorotsuki, have now doubled down on their claims, insisting it was actually ‘almost finished’.
‘Titanfall 3 is gone,’ Osvaldatore wrote on X. ‘Spoke again with source earlier this morning and everything about it was correct, including the ‘almost finished’, despite what that Bloomberg article said.’
While Schreier does have a very strong track record, and Respawn itself said it was in the ‘early stage’, these leakers were the first to suggest that it was an extraction shooter – so it seems they do have some insider knowledge.
The biggest question is whether it was actually Titanfall 3, or if it was, like Apex Legends, merely set in the same fictional universe. The latter would make more sense, as Titanfall 2, while critically acclaimed, wasn’t exactly a commercial hit.
Back in 2023, former Titanfall developer Mohammad Alavi revealed Respawn had worked ‘in earnest’ on Titanfall 3 for ‘about 10 months’, before it was ditched in favour of Apex Legends.
At the time, Alavi said: ‘Titanfall 2 came out, did what it did, and we were like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make Titanfall 3,’ and we worked on Titanfall 3 for about ten months, right? In earnest, right?
‘We had new tech for it, we had multiple missions going, we had a first playable, which was on par to be just as good if not better than whatever we had before, right? But I’ll make this clear: incrementally better, it wasn’t revolutionary. And that’s the key thing, right?’
As for whether Titanfall 3 could ever happen, it probably won’t materialise in the near future. Respawn is currently working on the sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and is co-developing upcoming strategy game Star Wars Zero Company.
More importantly it has to struggle with the fact that the audience for Apex Legends is stagnating and 100 staff have just been laid off, primarily those that were working on the new game – whether it was Titanfall 3 or not – and another unannounced title.
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