‘Titanfall 2’ Getting Single-Player Campaign, TV Spin-Off In Development

The original Titanfall‘s controversial approach of trying to blend a story campaign into the game’s multiplayer won’t be repeated. Respawn Entertainment lead writer Jesse Stern confirmed Titanfall 2 will receive a separate single-player campaign for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. He also revealed a TV series spin-off is in development.

Stern spoke with Forbes where he finally put the nail in the coffin on the question of a single-player campaign for the hybrid first-person shooter crossed with mechs and parkour.

“One of the shortcomings of the first game was we just 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 struggle of Respawn Entertainment’s development of Titanfall has become something of legend. As covered in The Final Hours of Titanfall, the studio struggled for time and resources. Eventually, the decision was made to combine the game’s campaign and multiplayer in an attempt to get the best of both worlds and still meet release requirements. Unfortunately, that became the largest sore point for the first-person shooter that stuck out over complaints about Xbox exclusivity and the game running at a lower resolution.

Respawn has more resources available to it for Titanfall 2. This will allow it to improve on the game’s multiplayer while also providing the missing single-player experience.

“We are doing our best to deliver a vision of grand global colonial warfare retelling the story of the American Revolution and the American Civil War in space,” Stern told Forbes. “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.”

Meanwhile, Stern also revealed he is developing a TV series spin-off based on the Titanfall universe. There are no details as of yet aside from it being developed as a partnership between Respawn and Lionsgate TV.

The news for Titanfall 2‘s single player campaign is great for those who missed that element in the original. This is slowly turning into the province of AAA shooters only, however. Gears of War developer Cliff Bleszinski explained in an interview with PC Gamer that campaigns usually costs 75 percent of a game’s budget only to see players spend a weekend on it before living in the multiplayer the rest of the time. This is why his upcoming arena shooter, Lawbreakers, will not have a campaign.

Electronic Arts recently gave a window on when Titanfall 2 might be released. The sequel is expected to arrive between holiday 2016 and the end of March 2017. Early 2017 is the most likely release date though. As previously covered by The Inquisitr, Battlefield 5’s release in October or November likely pushes Titanfall 2 back to early 2017 to avoid both first-person shooters from cannibalizing each other’s sales.

Will Titanfall 2 make you more likely to give the game a shot or would you rather just jump straight into multiplayer? Sound off in the comments below.

[Image via Respawn Entertainment]