Titanfall 2: "science meets magic" in a "grounded, human" world

Titanfall, the wall-running, jetpacking, mech-having shooter that captured imaginations for around seventeen minutes back in 2014, is getting a sequel. A sequel that will release sometime between April 2016 and March 2017, and that will hit PS4 as well as PC and Xbox One. All this we already knew—but now we know a bit more, courtesy of a Forbes interview with the game's lead writer, Jesse Stern.

Stern says that the Respawn is doing its 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.

“What inspires us is the junction of technological advancement with the inevitability of conflict and war and what the next war might look like. In Titanfall 2 there will be a lot of [scenes] where science meets magic, but keeping it grounded and dirty and human and real.”

Not too grounded I hope: this is the sequel to a game about boosting around with jetpacks and in mobile mechs, after all. Still, I like the idea of using non-military futuristic equipment in multiplayer battles: I'm now imagining Titanfall 2 as a potent mixture of the original and the surely upcoming Farming Simulator 2216.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.