Titanfall 3 Would Fix Me

Listen, I have no idea what’s going on with Titanfall 3 anymore. For the longest time, everyone said that it wasn’t being worked on in any capacity since Respawn had its hands full with Apex Legends and its various Star Wars projects. Then, this week, some leaker said that Titanfall 3 is basically finished and going to launch in 2026. Immediately after that leak was shared, Jeff Grubb said that Titanfall 3 doesn’t exist and that the leak is a lie.

With all the conflicting information going around, it feels impossible to know what’s actually happening with Titanfall 3 or if the game even exists at all. No matter what state of existence it’s in, there’s one thing I know about it for certain: Titanfall 3 would fix me.

Titanfall Is Special

Titanfall 2 is a game I replay every year or so. I don’t have some grand tradition with it, it’s just the kind of game that if I talk about enough, I need to immediately sit down and play.

It’s an incredibly tight package. The campaign is excellent and full of great ideas and set-pieces, the multiplayer is snappy and well-balanced – the game is all killer, no filler. It might be a little hyperbolic to say, but I view Titanfall 2 as a very rare kind of game; it’s about as close to perfect a video game can be.

All of that is to say that if Titanfall 3 were to come out and capture even a fraction of the spark that made Titanfall 2 special, I think it would easily go down as one of the best shooters of all time, right next to its predecessor. Obviously, that’s wishful thinking, and I’m hypothetically reviewing a video game that doesn’t exist. But, if you’ve played Titanfall 2, you’ve no doubt had the same thought about what Respawn would do in a follow-up.

There are so many different directions that Titanfall 3 could go in based on mechanics from Titanfall 2, like the grappling hook from the multiplayer that never appeared in the campaign or the time travel system that was introduced for a single level before disappearing from the game entirely. Respawn could also pull ideas from the compelling systems it’s been experimenting with in the various character powers in Apex Legends. Because of how much quality work Respawn has done, the possibilities for a Titanfall 3 seem endlessly exciting.

Additionally, there’s the Titan aspect of the game to consider. Titanfall was one of the last mainstream bastions of the mecha game genre, which seems to be held up almost exclusively at this point by Gundam, Armored Core, Mecha Break, and Steel Hunters — all fairly niche in the West. Titanfall had a unique take on the genre, however, making the mechs mostly slow and clunky, which gave them a much more grounded feel than the agile mechs found in games like Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. There’s plenty of untapped potential for Respawn to dive into since the genre feels a little undersaturated.

Games Without Any Fat

We could spend all day talking about what Titanfall 3 could look like if both EA and Respawn were interested. What I value the most about Titanfall 2, however, isn’t its individual mechanics but rather how they all come together to make a cohesive experience. It feels like every level of Titanfall 2 is packed full of ideas, and then suddenly, the campaign is over. It’s a great time, and then it ends before it runs out of ideas or overstays its welcome. There’s very little fat that could be trimmed out of Titanfall 2, and experiencing a game like that right now in a potential Titanfall 3 would be so refreshing.

I’ve spent the past few weeks chipping away at Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ endless objectives and copy-pasted side content, and before that, I was grinding away at the similarly endless content packed into Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Obviously, those are completely different kinds of games from Titanfall, but there’s a problem in the current era of gaming we’re in where it feels like publishers need every game to be 100 hours long. It’s refreshing to play something that focuses on being excellent at all times, even if the experience is significantly shorter.

At the end of the day, I just want something that only Titanfall can give me, and while I appreciate Apex Legends, it’s not Titanfall 3. I’m desperate. I think Titanfall 3 would fix all my problems and make me happy forever. No pressure, though.

Titanfall 2

Released

October 28, 2016

ESRB

M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Language, Violence

Engine

Source