For as well-received as Titanfall was, one of the game's major criticisms was a lack of a traditional single-player campaign. Instead, the sci-fi shooter interweaved its "story" into the multiplayer gameplay, with voiceovers and character portrays overlayed on top of the action going on. This time around, EA and developer Respawn will aim to deliver a proper story mode, one that offers fans the answers to questions they had regarding the universe.
"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," admitted lead writer Jesse Stern in an interview with Forbes.
"So 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," he continued. "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," Stern added, promising numerous scenes where "science meets magic." He assured, however, that the story will stay "grounded and dirty and human and real."
In addition to a proper single-player campaign, Stern also said the studio is working with Lionsgate TV — the television arm of the Hunger Games production company — on a Titanfall spin-off TV show. Details are light at the moment, but Stern said the biggest obstacle right now is cost. "It would be very expensive," he said. "We are trying to find a way to tell a story in the worlds we want to be in and produce in the TV model."
Titanfall 2 doesn't have a release date yet, but Stern revealed the developer is "a little past a year into it." He expects it to release sometime late this year or early 2017, which is around the window EA has given. During recent earnings calls, the publisher called for a fiscal 2017 release. EA's FY2017 runs from April 1, 2016 through March 31, 2017, so it's possible that Titanfall 2 could be EA's big holiday release for 2016. Titanfall originally released on Xbox One and PC in March 2014. It's sequel is expected to be available for Xbox One, PC, and PS4 this time around.
