'Titanfall' sequel headed to more than just Xbox and Windows
Standby for Titanfall, PlayStation 4 owners. The crumbs from the game's first birthday cake are just starting to get crunchy, and developer Respawn Entertainment's dropped news that there's a sequel in the works. What's more, it's shedding Windows and Xbox exclusivity according to IGN. "It'll be multiplatform," the studio's CEO Vince Zampella said. COO Dusty Welch said that the decision to release the initial game only on Microsoft platforms was a business decision above anything else, with Zampella adding that making the game wouldn't have been possible otherwise. All that to say, Microsoft did a lot of financial heavy lifting for Titanfall -- much like it did for the original Mass Effect. Any of the game's cloud-reliance shouldn't be lost in the transition to non-Redmond platforms either considering that PS4 developers can offload processing tasks to remote servers as well.
What else? Well, the game still doesn't have an official name, for one, and it's still really early in terms of development. That means there aren't any meaty details to share just yet, but Zampella was candid about how the first game's multiplayer-only campaign turned out and how that'd affect the sequel:
"I mean it obviously prohibits a certain group of people playing the game, and as content creators you want to get into as many peoples's hands as possible. We put some single-player elements in there though, and tried to mix it up. Maybe we could have mixed things up a bit better because some people blew right by it and didn't even see it because there was so much action happening around it.
It's tough, because if you hit people over the head with it it becomes intrusive, and there are people who don't want or care about it. Where does the needle fall? I think it takes a while to figure that out and we haven't figured it out yet."
That doesn't necessarily mean a full-on single-player campaign is in the works, but it sounds like one is at least being considered. The studio is also thinking about taking a page from Evolve's playbook and making the sequel's DLC free so as not to divide the player population among haves and have-nots. Given that all of the first game's downloadable content is available for the low, low price of $0 now, that seems a pretty likely move.
