Titanfall seemed like one of the big new IPs of the current-generation. It landed with a rather significant splash in March 2014, having reached over 7 million players by the end of that year.
The sequel was therefore very hyped among the first-person shooter community. However, when Titanfall 2 appeared on the market in Fall 2016, it did so squeezed between Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1. The result was disastrous in terms of sales, even though the reception for the newly added single player campaign was very favorable.
A third Titanfall game was in development at Respawn, but eventually got canceled in favor of the Battle Royale spin-off Apex Legends, which dropped out of nowhere in early 2019 and immediately garnered a huge following.
With the occasion of Respawn's 10th-anniversary celebration, IGN asked CEO Vince Zampella whether there was still life in that franchise. His reply sounds hopeful, though he doesn't provide any timeframe.
There’s nothing currently in development. But it’s always there. You see the little bits of stuff coming back through the lore in Apex Legends. At some point, I would personally like to see some kind of resurrection there. We’ll see if I can make that happen.
Titanfall fans will have to sit tight, then. Zampella is heading up development for a new project at DICE LA, though, and he confirmed it will likely be a shooter running on the Frostbite Engine.
That team is a shooter team. Chances are it’s going to be something along those lines. There’s a lot of really good shooter talent there. But I don’t want to lock it in and say that’s definitely exactly what they’re doing, because we’re going to look at everything and pick something that feels amazing. The same tenets that apply to Respawn of doing something new and exciting and kind of breaking the genre a little bit is what we’re going to apply to DICE LA. We’re going to look at trying to do something cool. We want to do something that’s not competitive with other EA games so that we’re kind of filling in the right gaps in the portfolio. We have some really good ideas, but it’ll be a little bit.
DICE is a Frostbite team, so they’re familiar with it. You need to pick the right engine to make the game that you want to make. Most likely it’ll be Frostbite because that’s what they’re familiar with and that’s what they know and that’s what’s going to be the quickest ramp-up time. But if we decided to do something where another engine made sense that could be an option. So much wealth of experience in that engine and the ability to extract amazing looking graphics out of that engine that it would be a shame to waste that.