Ex-Respawn Devs Comment on Titanfall 2 Being Released Just a Week After Battlefield 1

Titanfall 2 down

While Titanfall 2 was well receieved critically when it launched, it probably didn’t sell as well as it should have given its release window. For those unaware, publisher EA made the baffling decision of releasing Titanfall 2 just a week after Battlefield 1 — arguably, the publisher’s biggest multiplayer IP.

In a video interview talking about their new studo Gravity Well, former Respawn devs Drew McCoy and Jon Shiring commented on Titanfall 2’s poorly planned release date.

Question: What was it like having that release schedule and then having it released one week after Battlefield 1? A popular wisdom is that it crushed you guys, is that the internal wisdom as well?

Drew McCoy: I think it hurt us in the sense that multiplayer competitive games are a very nearly a zero sum situation to players. If you’re not not one of the top five most played shooters in the online space, you’re a quote-unquote “dead game” and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because players convince their friends not to play the game “Ah the game;s dead” dont play, come play this other game with me, everyone else is on this game with me. Everyone wants to be in the popular crowd.

You can watch McCoy and Shiring talk about the Titanfall 2 release date thing at around the 54:30 mark.

Important to note here, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare was relesaed on November 4, 2016 — just a week after Titanfall 2’s launch (October 28, 2016). As you can already imagine, the game being sandwiched in between two heavyweight multiplayer games’ releases (BF1 and Infinite Warfre) isn’t really a smart move for any game, much less one that’s also focused on online multiplayer. Ultimately though, it’s publisher EA who’s to blame given it had control on when it wanted to release both of its titles. Most assumed (including this writer) that EA released the two shooters so close together to try and pry away as much as they can from Call of Duty’s fanbase, which sadly worked the other way around.

While Titanfall 2 might not have sold as much as fans would have liked, it’s still one heck of a game, and one we recognize as one of the best shooters of this console generation. Sadly, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting a sequel to it anytime soon.

Do you think Titanfall 2 would be a bigger success than it is now if it got a different release date? Let us know your thoughts down below.

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LordCancer Kain
LordCancer Kain
3 years ago

They cry about released dates but put trophies in their game that prove most of those that did play that crap do not finish it.

If ever you needed a metric to design better games..

Which begs the question who did they make this heaping pile of crap for? sick of developers making the same game for the 3% crowd and complaining about it.

Alex
Reply to  LordCancer Kain
3 years ago

You think Titanfall 2 is “crap?” Daaaamn. Loved both the SP and MP. I still play it from time to time.

Chuck Whitaker
Chuck Whitaker
Reply to  Alex
3 years ago

titanfall 2 was and still is an amazing game with tight controls; Hope we get another sequel one day.

LordCancer Kain
LordCancer Kain
Reply to  Alex
3 years ago

it doesn’t matter if i liked parts of it or none of it, they do not make games for me. the reality is titanfall 2 was a commercial failure and a sequel is not in development. win!

i am sick of hearing them wine about the release timing, when was it ever going to be a good time with yearly releases and or entire player bases cemented in year two? they are large part of why every multiplayer game is now a games as service product requiring a life commitment. they had as fair of a chance as any to peel off and they failed. now they know how it feels to be thq trying to make a living every year they released a new call of duty.

by the way, good games do not get lost in the crowd, they stand out. i frankly have no sympathy for any developer chasing the cod crowd even if, or especially if, they are former infinity ward developers. the single player wasn’t good either and it has some of the most stupid and annoying trophies.

the gauntlet in particular is asinine, there is a reason only 3.4%-1.6% bothered to replay for collectibles.

they can’t even get rid of this crap at $5.

Adrik
Adrik
Reply to  Alex
3 years ago

Well, for player engagement to tank like it did he is obviously right. No matter how much people try to defend it great games don’t shed players like a Samoyed blowing its coat. This is fact. Out of 6 million gamers only .33% of its gamer base is left. If the game was so perfect and so great than where did 99.67% of its gamers go? The PvP was meant to keep this game afloat and it couldn’t even keep 1% playing.

The problem is Mech shooters aren’t games to anchor to their PvP. That is the truth that the diehards have ti choke on as they defend this game to the hilt for its poor content.

Deathly Wishes
Deathly Wishes
Reply to  LordCancer Kain
3 years ago

Titanfall 2 was the most innovative shooter to come out that year. It had everything people wanted. No bull crap loot crates, an amazing campaign, fantastic multiplayer with such incredible depth and a fun learning curve to it, and by far created the greatest community of players who are just so nice to play with. Titanfall’s community is the least toxic gaming community I have ever been so fortunate to be a part of

LordCancer Kain
LordCancer Kain
Reply to  Deathly Wishes
3 years ago

fps are a dead genre with no innovation, that is a fact.

titanfall was never anything more than cod with a sci-fi skin.

if you are not named call of duty, battlefield, or halo. you do not exist… yeah yeah, doom, rage and wolfeinstein, or as i like to call them, the exact same game! the only reason titanfall was made is because ea hoped ex infinity ward developers would strike lightning a third time, but it didnt happen after two and a half releases.

how many other studios are making new shooter ip? tell me the last new break out fps? there hasn’t been one this entire generation, even respawn abandon ship to make a 3rd person star wars game.

dead.

Deathly Wishes
Deathly Wishes
Reply to  LordCancer Kain
3 years ago

The game may have a small community and it may not have the attention that Call of Duty has, but Titanfall 2 is still a pretty active game amongst it’s small and passionate community. The Titanfall 2 sub reddit is such a chill community and are the ones who continue to play the game, there are even players outside of the reddit community who play the game to this day. Believe it or not but recently Titanfall 2 was the sixth most purchased game on Xbox recently (about 10,000 up to 25,000) players are on regularly. However PS4 hangs at about 8,000 players and PC at about 2,000 to 4,000 players. The game may not have overwhelming amounts of players on but the game is not dead. I play pretty much everyday and even though it takes up to five minutes to find a match, I don’t really mind, it is a solid game.

Adrik
Adrik
Reply to  Deathly Wishes
3 years ago

The game is commercially dead. My favorite MMO is City of Heroes and it died a commercial death and was shut down back in 2012. There is a private server that has over 100k people playing it, larger than the Titanfall 2 community, and that in no way means Ncsoft is going to bring the game back, especially due to it needing 400k to break even.

Also, by 2020 Titanfall 2 only having 20k people playing means that the game lost between 99.67% (based on selling 6 million copies) of its player base. Only 0.33% of its playerbase is left. It is still playable but it is completely dead as a franchise. You know what that means right? It means the players left have no say in what the game should be because they are the players that are not worth selling a game too. The diehards are so insignifigant that no competent businessman would care what they have to say because they are the people who will buy the game no matter what state it is in. You can’t even care about their feedback because as you can see they will just tell the company “the game is great the problem is people don’t realise!”.

Jimmy Donnellan
Jimmy Donnellan
Reply to  LordCancer Kain
3 years ago

Christ, I have seen a lot of bad takes in my time but this is right up there.

Going to come back to this in a year to remind myself how not to have an opinion.

LordCancer Kain
LordCancer Kain
Reply to  Jimmy Donnellan
3 years ago

good games do not get lost in a crowd, they stand out.

this was cod with a sci-fi skin and stupid trophies. look at some of these trophies, .09% platinum rate, less than 3.5% could be bothered to find 25 collectible in that trash campaign. …becomes the master 1.4% just go down the list, it is a mirror of bad game design.

comeback to it in a year or ten and it will not change that titanfall 2 was a commercial failure and there isn’t a sequel in development at this time because of it. i doubt ea revisits this ip, the market has spoken.

Adrik
Adrik
Reply to  LordCancer Kain
3 years ago

No Mech shooter ever survives as PvP game. People forget that Hawken and MWO all fell the same way. Big interest in the beginning and then mass exodus that leaves its diehards making every excuse they can. People forget that back in Sierra’s days, Starsiege was released as a PvP counter to Mechwarrior. Mechwarrior which boasted its PvE credentials spanked Starseige, despite Starsieges superior multiplayer. That is why Sierra abandoned Starsiege for Tribes.

If you are a mech enthusiast why do you want to play a game where a lone pilot can, without any help, cripple your titan? Why do you want to play a game where your constantly respawning the big bad mech that brought you in? If it were a PvE game it would be fine, who cares how you wreck a mob. As a PvP game it was CoD Infinite Warfare with Mechs. People keep forgetting that CoD Infinite Warfare took a 50% loss in sales all because it was a sci-fi. Sci PvP shooters themselves don’t work unless they play off the Team Fortress 2 dynamics of funny haha sort of feel.

GeekGI
GeekGI
3 years ago

Titanfall 2 most certainly suffered from EA’s piss poor release strategy. The sad thing about this is EA did not care about maximizing on Titanfall 2’s amazing potential, but instead placed the game in an unfair pissing contest with Activision’s COD. TF2 never stood a chance in that climate. If given the proper release window TF2 would have been a raving success. This is what happens when passion projects like TF2 end up in the hands of publishing sharks like EA.

HAppY_KrAToS
HAppY_KrAToS
3 years ago

EA are the rEApers of video games industry.
Everything they touch dies immediately. Insta dEAth.

When I think we will never get a proper Mass Effect game again, because of EA…my favorite series ever, I feel like going to the EA headquarters, grabbing the 50 or 100 main guys “who decide” everything… and making them play ME-Andromeda, for 2’000 hours. Until they all scream “ahhh, this game is so bad… with the thousands of employees and hundreds of billions $ cash we have, it was impossible to screw up this game.”

With all the cash they have, and their mass.ive game catalog, whether they make, edit or publish the game, today, we could be getting almost one new EA game, big or small, PER DAY.

Even amazing fun titles like Peggle 2, could be done by 10 or 20 employees, in 9 or 12 months.
But hey, why would EA release/ publish a game, if they can’t put 10 or 20 thousand dollars worth of microtransactions in it ?… So sad…
Currently re- playing all the levels in Peggle 2, on old ps3, with all the family. Tons of fun. But again, the will never be a Peggle 3 game… they can’t monetize a game ? They don’t make the game. It’s that simple.

Oh, I almost forgot, PHUK EA
.
………

Edonus
Edonus
3 years ago

Titanfall 2 had 2 major issues that hurt it.
1) The gaming media attacked Titanfall 1 too much. They were so in to keepin Xbox One down they chased people away from the game with very extreme propaganda. The big ones were it was an online only game, it didnt have a standard campaign, it didnt have content, no one is playing it, then of course the resolution stuff. All of that stuff was nonsense. Anyway they made such a negative wave around the game it spilled over to the sequel so even as sony people would have access to the new one they had been pushed away from it.
2) Respawn messed up the MP. The campaign was awesome no if and but about it. The MP was such a backstep from the first it through off people that loved the first. It had more flash and extras but they broke the foundation of the game making it super generic. They took its edge away.

That is why Titanfall 1 sold more and was play for longer than Titanfall 2.

I would love for them to take it back to what TF1 was in MP and expand on the campaign from TF2.

The release date thing is a small factor that the media blowout of proportion to cover up the what they did in 1). The game was just as good as the other games. If it wasnt for the negative sentiments the media sowed the game would have had legs.

Adrik
Adrik
3 years ago

Titanfall 2 failed just like Titanfall failed. Its a PvP focused Mech shooter in a genre , mech shooters, that never survive as PvP games. The review process of todays games are so flawed that it is beyond funny. What does Titanfall 2 like Titanfall have? The game has no hook to keep you playing. You either fall in love with the gameplay and decide this is all you want to play or you play it until it gets boring and moves on. The PvP just like in Titanfall is one of the most overhyped and most over excused games. The game has 9 story missions, 10 pvp modes, and 1 co-op mode. What happened? well you can look at how quickly it loses its player base to see how wrong people are about the game.

This game loses 90% of its playerbase in the span of a few months. Titanfall was a ghost town a year into release. Titanfall 2 was a ghost town with in the span of the first year. Why? Because it has no content. All that is left playing the game are the diehards who want to think their perfect game was crippled because it’s release. Nope. It died because it was the wrong type of game to build a PvP focused game around it. We have enough examples of Mech PvP shooters all suffering the same fate while their PvE focuses Mech shooters outlived them.

Arslan Shahbaz
2 years ago

i love how this game is constantly reminding us these were real people who were braver than all of us here today, this just looks amazing and i couldn’t help but get choked at parts
COD Battle field1 such a good game, you can feel the emotion, and the harsh reality of war.

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