Apex Legends won’t be getting Titanfall 2’s lumbering war machines in Season 5, or any time soon, Respawn game director Chad Grenier has confirmed. In fact, he admitted adding Titans is “against the rules” for the battle royale developers.
Titans — and their absence in Kings Canyon — have been a hot topic surrounding Respawn’s battle royale since it first debuted in early 2019. Apex was born out of the Titanfall 3 development cycle. The iconic war machines were only hooked from the title fairly late in the process as Respawn pivoted to the title we see today.
With much of the cult Titanfall fanbase following Respawn to their next FPS game, it makes sense fans are eager to see major elements from the series added. Apex is, after all, set in the same universe — it makes sense we’d see Titans eventually.
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Unfortunately, it looks like that may still remain just a pipe dream. Despite the fact the whole dev team would “love” to find a way to add Titans to the game, it’s “against the rules” when it comes to the game’s development, Grenier has revealed.
The issue, Respawn’s game director said in an interview with vg247, is there are only two choices when it comes to adding Titans: make them so powerful they take over the game, or have them “lose their fun” in a weakened state.
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“We all love Titans, just from a fantasy-fulfilment perspective. It’s always been a huge challenge to balance them in a game that has pilots and Titans,” Grenier admitted. He added Respawn would likely never add the machines to Apex.
“We actually had a version of Apex early on that had Titans. It had pilots with wall-running, and all that in there. We faced the same challenges we tried to solve with Titanfall too,” the Respawn development guru continued.
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“How do you design a map that supports both big and small? Can you balance a game where you have Titans and squishy pilots in the same game together? How do you have a competitive, predictable game?”
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That’s not to say Grenier didn’t completely pen a huge red line through the Titans. They may eventually arrive in Apex in a form outside of the “destructive machines” from the Titanfall series. It might just not be “soon.”
“Once we did some playtests slowing the game down a bit by taking out wall-running, taking out Titans, we all realized that we had a much more competitive, fun game that you could invest a lot of time in and get really good at.”
“We love Titans. They’re in the universe, the Apex arena is in the Outlands, separate from Titans,” the Apex game director continued. “They’re just against the rules at this point in time. It’s an interesting thing to think about, but with those thoughts come flashbacks to all the Titanfall challenges too.”
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This stance all lines up with now-departed Respawn producer Drew McCoy’s comment on Titans when the game was first released too: “For now, Titans are just not a thing [in Apex]. We are no longer considering it”. It looks like, behind the scenes, nothing has changed on that front in the past year either.
The closest players might come to experiencing a rampaging Titan across Kings Canyon in Season 5 could come in the newly-leaked player vs environment (PvE) event — discovered by returning data miner That1MiningGuy — that could see Titans, Spectres, Stalkers, Frag Drones, and more debut in the battle royale.
