Titanfall won't have a traditional single-player campaign because, quite frankly, it's not worth the studio's time. Simply put, not enough people finish a campaign, so the time would be better spent elsewhere, like fine-tuning the game's multiplayer gameplay. Speaking to GamesIndustry, Respawn's Vince Zampella explained that being a "small startup studio" forced them to make some pretty difficult decisions, the omission of a traditional campaign being one of them.
"We make these single-player missions that take up all the focus of the studio, that take a huge team six months to make, and players run through it in 8 minutes," he said. "And how many people finish the single-player game? It's a small percentage. It's like, everyone plays through the first level, but 5 percent of people finish the game.
"Really, you split the team. They're two different games. They're balanced differently, they're scoped differently. But people spend hundreds of hours in the multiplayer experience versus 'as little time as possible rushing to the end' [in single-player]. So why do all the resources go there? To us it made sense to put it here. Now everybody sees all those resources, and multiplayer is better. For us it made sense."
That's not to say Titanfall won't have any narrative; it will just have to be accessed from within the main multiplayer mode. As someone who plays Call of Duty and Battlefield strictly for the multiplayer, I can't say I'm too heartbroken over this. But while separate single-player/multiplayer modes don't work for Respawn or Titanfall, Zampella admitted that certain games make it work well, Assassin's Creed being one of them.
You can read our full impressions of Titanfall from E3 here.
