Respawn COO says single player isn’t ruled out for future

Respawn’s Chief Operating Officer sat down with GameInformer recently to talk about the past, present, and future of Titanfall. Respawn’s COO is Dusty Welch, who joined Respawn in January of this year. Welch served as the Head of Publishing at Activision previously on Call of Duty titles.

“The team here was cautiously optimistic going into E3 back in 2013,” Welch recalls. “While I say that, they acknowledge that they were also very nervous, and they say it’s the first time they’ve been nervous bringing a product to E3 in quite some time. And look at Vince’s pedigree, right?”

He spoke that single player campaign for a future Titanfall game isn’t ruled out.

“Campaign mode, I think, was interesting but ultimately not as engaging or rewarding as we would’ve liked,” Welch says. “It kind of begs the question for us – do you go further in that? Do you trim that back?”

Welch says that the team is open to discussing a traditional single-player experience for future titles in the franchise, but it’s not a guarantee. “Would I rule it out for the future? Certainly not,” he says.” “But I think that there’s a lot of reward in continuing to push the paradigm that Titanfall introduced, which is this always connected, real live visceral multiplayer universe. We learned a lot, and I think it’s up to us to think about how we apply the learning to make the next game even more expansive and more engaging than the first.”

Welch went on to talk about the eSports response so far from Respawn. The community members want eSports features in the game, but Respawn has yet to deliver any. Private matches are still in beta, with more options needed for fans.

“eSports is something that, as a developer, we are really keen on tracking,” Welch says. “We’re interested in it.”

Respawn knows there are Titanfall fans that want to see the game played competitively, but the team is taking a methodical approach to it. “If I had my druthers, then I would try and test this a little bit further this year,” Welch tells us. “I think it would be interesting to take some more steps in the eSports direction. I don’t know if we will, though. There’s obviously a lot of work to do in the game and in the code and in the spectator mode and some others things. I think it’s certainly something that the audience is begging for, and it gives us a lot of encouragement thinking beyond this current Titanfall and into the future.”

He also spoke about how the team plans to better engage with the PC players for Titanfall and its future.

“We would like to find the ability to sell to more users and attach to more users through Origin,” Welch says. “And so part of what we’re doing is providing more content and more features, more functionality, but also, we’re listening to the PC audience that’s asking for all kinds of PC platform specific content upgrades or features upgrades for hardware and software to make their gameplay experience really top notch.”

“Part of it is working with Nvidia to work on some of these technologies to really have their graphics cards showcase Titanfall in the best light,” Welch explains. “Some of that will come out in the update this week, some of that will take several more weeks if not months to fully deliver on, but those kinds of things really help to provide more replayability to the PC platform. And I think over the last couple weeks we’re starting to see more of that.”

SOURCE: GameInformer