Titanfall 3 is not in development, says Respawn

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You can give up on expecting a sequel to 2016's excellent Titanfall 2. Respawn isn't making it, for now at least.

Respawn Entertainment's new free-to-play battle royale FPS called Apex Legends launched today, but if you were (like me) holding out hope that Titanfall 3 was also secretly in the works, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Titanfall 3 isn't in development—at least right now.

Speaking to Eurogamer, lead producer Drew McCoy talked about Respawn's motives for attempting to pull off a surprise release—despite Apex Legends' existence being leaked last week. "To try and convince a skeptical audience for months with trailers and hands-on articles, we're just like 'let the game speak for itself'—it's the most powerful antidote to potential problems," McCoy explained. "The world thinks we're making Titanfall 3 and we're not—this is what we're making."

If you've been paying close attention to Respawn over the years, this might come as a surprise. Back in 2017, inside sources told Kotaku that Titanfall 3 was well into development and would release by the end of 2018. But that obviously didn't happen.

So what changed? We don't exactly know. As Kotaku speculates, the most likely scenario is that Titanfall 3 was in development but something caused Respawn to pivot and turn it into the Apex Legends you can play right now. Maybe Respawn shifted gears on development sometime in 2017 but misjudged how quickly the battle royale genre was going to explode, making Apex Legends feel like a late comer to an already crowded party? We might never know.

Whatever the case, what's clear is that Titanfall 3 isn't in the works. That isn't to say Respawn couldn't start working on it sometime in the future but for now if you want a new Titanfall game Apex Legends is going to have to fill that void. Fortunately, despite lacking Titans, Apex Legends is actually really fun.

Steven Messner
Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.