Since the inception of Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall, and mostly after the conclusion of E3, there have been heavy speculations that co-founder Vince Zampella is working on the title with respect to the current generation Call of Duty games. This, of course, because of Zampella’s history with Infinity Ward when he founded the studio with Jason West before being fired.
However, Zampella recently came forward to end all such speculations by stating that Respawn’s newest shooter is not coming to the market as a direct competitor for Infinity Ward’s upcoming Call of Duty title – Call of Duty: Ghosts.
In an interview with GameIndustry International, Zampella stated: “Honestly, we're not shipping the same time as them. We're going for something different. We're not gunning for Call of Duty. We're doing our thing. The important thing is to make sure what we're doing is fun. I'm OK with Call of Duty being big. I helped create it, so I'm proud to see it's something so big that it goes beyond me.”
As far as the game’s emphasis on multiplayer gameplay is concerned, a very modest Zampella said: “For us, we're a small startup studio. We're 60-some developers. So for us to be able to focus on one platform [helps]. For us it was really helpful to focus on the core game and what's fun. It's scoped more adequately to what we have the power to do as a start-up studio.”
And while this means that the company will have to scrap the single-player campaign of the game to achieve what Zampella had brought into being during his time with Infinity Ward, he said that the company makes these single-player missions that demands focus from everyone in the studio, “that take a huge team six months to make, and players run through it in 8 minutes. And how many people finish the single-player game? It's a small percentage. It's like, everyone plays through the first level, but 5 percent of people finish the game. Really, you split the team. They're two different games.”
“They're balanced differently, they're scoped differently. But people spend hundreds of hours in the multiplayer experience versus 'as little time as possible rushing to the end' [in single-player]. So why do all the resources go there? To us it made sense to put it here. Now everybody sees all those resources, and multiplayer is better. For us it made sense,” he added.
Titanfall is currently set for a 2014 release on Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.
