It's been just under nine years since Titanfall landed on the PC and Xbox, and just under nine years since publisher Electronic Arts has been underutilizing one of its most interesting and promising franchises. With the rumor that EA has canned a third Titanfall game after years of development, I think it's time we look back on what this game was, what it could have been, and lamentably, what it never will be. What is Titanfall right now? Part of the first wave of Xbox One titles and one of the console's very few exclusives, the original Titanfall was the first game developed by Respawn Entertainment, which was founded by former executives of Call of Duty creator Infinity Ward. It made a splash from its introduction at E3 2013, wowing gamers with a mix of fresh, parkour-infused multiplayer shooting and the titular Titan mechs as a fresh addition to the genre.

Still, Stadniuk laments missing what could have been pivotal moments of his professional "Apex Legends" career. GnaskeStrafeDel, his squad with Præstensgaard and Biggins, disbanded after the 2020 championship, but all three were set to come together once more under the GMT Esports banner at the beginning of 2022; the highly anticipated reunion was announced just weeks before the invasion. Stadniuk couldn't attend either the Apex Legends Global Series: Split 2 Playoffs LAN in Stockholm in April or the 2022 Championship in Raleigh, N.C., in July. His team won $13,000 without him at the ReWired Festival 2022 in October in Fayetteville, Arkansas. These three tournaments boasted international competition, million-dollar prize pools and more than 40 teams.

Catalyst will be playable when "Apex Legends: Eclipse" launches Nov. 1. In the game's ongoing story, the Apex Games arrive at Cleo after the local government agrees to host the tournament in exchange for financial assistance. Catalyst, angered that corporate interests are now threatening the terraforming work she and her fellow colonists have done, enters the games with the intent of using the prize money to help her people. This puts her on a direct collision course with Seer, the Legend who brought the Apex Games to Cleo.

Hopefully, the designs of some of these areas will help players live longer. POIs are usually teeming with high-end guns and equipment, and choosing to drop into one at the beginning of a match is always risky. You'll most likely be racing against a dozen enemies in a mad scramble for loot. Most of those squads will be killed within minutes, but Respawn hopes to alleviate that in Broken Moon. The map will still have the small, chaotic POIs for players looking for intense landing fights, but also larger ones for squads that want prime loot but also some time to get their bearings.

The two-year online stint also proved to be a fruitful testing ground to improve the viewing experience for fans at home. Battle royale esports have always faced unique challenges for spectators. While games like "Overwatch" and "Valorant" take place on smaller maps and feature only 10 players, each game of "Apex Legends" is set on a much larger piece of terrain and begins with 60 different players active. They can be eliminated at any time, and each game lasts about twenty minutes, with a fair amount of downtime. Nelson rightly touts the development of Multiview to make "Apex" easier to watch, a Twitch feature that allows fans of particular teams or players to see the action from individual perspectives, with up to four different viewpoints at once.

I'm a firm believer that people will do their best work when they love what they're doing. And so I or Evan could put a design or a plan in play in front of people, and if it's not what they love and what they want the game to be, then it's never going to work, right? The game is just made by a bunch of passionate game developers who like what they're building and think this is the new cool thing that hopefully other people will like. And more often than not, it is. I think there's a large portion of the team that will spend the entire day making the game and then go and relax by playing the game for a few hours to unwind.

Eighteen months ago, Fabio Dores was making good money as a drag queen. Performing under the name Felicity Suxwell, he had a club residency and worked hen nights throughout the UK, attracting enough bookings to quit his day job at a lettings agency. Then lockdown came and everything shut down. Bored at home, he was browsing Facebook and spotted an advertisement for LegionFarm, an online video-game coaching platform that offered to match pro gamers with clients looking to improve their abilities. As a skilled player of battle royale hit Apex Legends, he applied to become a coach.

Before we dive into drop strategies and weapon selection, it's best to note the overall speed of specific battle royales. This genre rewards aggressive gameplay, often encouraging members to continuously hunt down opponents and quickly grab loot. For players who struggle to execute precise and fast inputs, like me, certain games may pose more of a physical challenge than others. For example, "Apex Legends" rarely gives individuals a reprieve, as the parkour mechanics of the Titanfall series are highly emphasized: Furiously climbing buildings and sliding across the landscape are key tactics when playing. Even though "Apex Legends" offers characters with defensive and stationary abilities like Gibraltar, Caustic and Wattson, you still need to rapidly traverse the map.

The minds at Respawn Entertainment are wizards when it comes to the action-adventure genre. Twenty-fourteen's Titanfall and its criminally underrated followup, 2016's Titanfall 2, challenged traditional boots-on-the-ground shooters with a heightened sense of scale and verticality, while the more recent Jedi: Fallen Order etched itself as one of the greatest Star Wars narratives told in any medium. The Los Angeles studio's fixation with exoskeletons, Blade Runner, and visuals that bleed Wachowski and Masamune Shirow's Ghost In The Shell is nothing new, but they are intertwined with world-building to create headier pockets of science fiction bliss. The free-to-play shooter set in the Titanfall universe first launched in February 2019. No extended gameplay reveals that cringe out with comms from Chad and the rest of the QA team.

While Apex Legends isn't a game made for hand-to-hand fighting, players occasionally settle the quest to become champion with an impromptu boxing match between the two remaining teams. Now that fight is going to be a part of the game, at least for a little while, as the Fight Night collection event rolls out during season seven. The game's developer, Respawn, has frequently added reshaped portions of the map around certain characters, and this "town takeover" is dedicated to Pathfinder, the robot with a collectible heirloom item of boxing gloves. The new area is a special zone where the usual guns. There are also loot balls that you can punch out to collect high-level items, although they're no use within the zone itself.