A leaked image of the next cover for Game Informer has revealed that Respawn Entertainment and Electronic Arts’ first project together is a next-gen multiplayer shooter called Titanfall.
The cover, which was first discovered on the Google Play store by NeoGAF user “Cartman86“, shows a female character standing on top of a fallen mech (or Titan) while shooting it at point blank range. The text under the image reads, “After a bitter split with Activision and Call of Duty, Respawn debuts its bold vision for next-gen multiplayer.”
According to details from the article posted on the NeoGAF forum, Respawn is developing an Xbox One and PC version of Titanfall — “someone else” is working on a version for the Xbox 360 — and they plan to launch the game in Spring 2014. The article mentions that Respawn considered developing a version for the PlayStation 4 but decided that it would “prove too difficult for a small team,” however, the studio added “Not to say we won’t [go multiplatform] in the future, but for our first game we wanted to focus on making the best game we could.”
Respawn also revealed that they were initially having trouble making the game work using the 5GB of GDDR3 RAM available on the Xbox One, but have made up for it by using Microsoft’s cloud computing to run many of the physics and AI calculations. The article notes that Titanfall will have “unlimited dedicated servers” for cloud computing, and without them the game would have been “impossible” to develop.
Titanfall is, unsurprisingly, a multiplayer first-person shooter that uses a storytelling style similar to the Left 4 Dead series. Very few details are currently known about the game’s plot, but it takes place in the future when Humans have been segregated between Earth and “frontier planets.” The driving force behind the matches is that a corporation is attempting to “take the resources of these frontier people.”
Player characters are referred to as “Pilots,” and they can either take to the fight on foot or in 24-foot tall Mechs called Titans. While on foot, Pilots are extremely agile and have access to a variety of different weapons (Pistols, Assault Rifles, Anti-Titan Rocket Launcher, Data Knife used to hack AI characters). The giant Titans are said to move at the speed of “a regular soldier in many first-person shooters” and can use “an array of heavy firepower,” making them “formidable adversaries in open spaces.”
The GI article states that “the more open maps, healthy mix of enemy AI and real players, and the ultra-powerful titans, the gameplay loop in Titanfall is more accommodating to newcomers.” As a result, “the average time of life seems drastically increased over the average Call of Duty, Battlefield, or Halo match.”
Titanfall will be officially revealed next week at E3, as more information is announced on Respawn’s first game we will let you know.