Fans of video game Titanfall may have to wait for up to a year to see the sequel and a TV series spin-off is in development.
Lead writer Jesse Stern promises Titanfall 2 will portray a world in which science meets magic, but a world which will still be grounded, dirty, human and real.
Stern and his colleagues in the creative team at Respawn Entertainment started work on the sequel in late 2014 after spending six months adding content to the first edition. As a then-start-up which only had a couple of computers, Respawn did not have the resources to do both multi-player and single-player versions.
Flush with cash after Titanfall clocked 10 million individual users, the sequel will have a dedicated single player campaign. Distributor Electronic Arts EA -5.43% has not set a release date, indicating only it will be out in fiscal 2017, which runs from April 1 through March 31, 2017. Were only a little past a year into it, he tells Forbes. It takes two years to make these things usually. Sometime late this year or early next seems like the right neighborhood (for completion).
The multi-player game will be even better than it was the first time around. The first game was an Xbox exclusive (initially). This one is going to be widely available, I believe on all platforms. One of the shortcomings of the first game was we just did not have the mechanism to tell everyone heres who you are, heres where you are and whos around you. We knew all the answers, we just could not deliver it.
So we are doing our best to deliver a vision of grand global colonial warfare retelling the story of the American Revolution and the American Civil War in space. We imagined the next generation of immigrants moving out to the new frontier of an inhabitable planet. Rather than taking a traditional sci-fi approach to that we wanted to look at how that would happen practically, what the ships would look like and with machines that were designed for excavation and construction, demolition and working the land, and what happens when they are turned into instruments of war.
What inspires us is the junction of technological advancement with the inevitability of conflict and war and what the next war might look like. In Titanfall 2 there will be a lot of [scenes] where science meets magic, but keeping it grounded and dirty and human and real.
Stern misses the daily buzz of working on episodic TV and is developing a number of projects including a series spin-off of Titanfall with Respawn in partnership with Lionsgate TV. What I love about TV is the tempo, he says. Every day you are collaborating with other writers, working with your cast and crew and your studio and the network. You come up with an idea, you pitch it, you sell it, you shoot it, cut it and edit it and come up with another one.
His ambitions jell with Respawn Entertainment CEO Vince Zampella who wants to diversify into scripted and animated TV series. Perhaps the biggest challenge for a Titanfall series is the cost factor. It would be very expensive, he says. We are trying to find a way to tell a story in the worlds we want to be in and produce in the TV model.
More at the source.