Apex Legends: Here's Why There Are No Titans in The Game

Respawn Entertainment

Respawn Entertainment's new free-to-play battle royale game Apex Legends is out now, and it's getting a lot of attention, but fans are wondering why Apex Legends is missing the mechs from Respawn Entertainment's popular Titanfall series.

Respawn already confirmed that Apex Legends is not a sequel to Titanfall 2 but it's set in the same universe, leading fans to wonder if the wall-running mechs were considered for the battle royale game. Executive Producer Drew McCoy recently told IGN that they just didn't work within the battle royale genre.

"During development of Apex Legends, we prototyped a lot of stuff," McCoy explained. "Having come from Titanfall 2, we tried wall-running and double jumping and triple jumping, and all sorts of crazy stuff. And the goal of the game from a development standpoint was to create something strategic and masterable and learnable and very deep, and a lot of those mechanics were detrimental to those goals."

According to McCoy, the Titans made combat hard to read, and that explains why Respawn decided to have three characters per team instead of a four-man or five-man squad: "Because the combat encounters were getting too complex and too hairy, where you couldn't mentally keep track of where everyone was and the state of all the stuff," McCoy said. "So we talked about our action block phase of development. That's actually something we take with us throughout the whole process of development. It's not just prototyping, it's also iteration. We playtest the game for hours every day so that we can be making sure that we're hitting our goals as far as what this game is trying to accomplish. So for this game, the depth of the game and the strategy of the game really was the lynchpin on deciding these mechanics."

It looks like Respawn's efforts have paid off. The game has already drawn over a million players.

Apex Legends is now available for free on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

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