Mohammed Alavi, the excitable and excited senior single-player designer at Titanfall 2 developer Respawn, takes a deep breath before leaning forward in his chair to speak deliberately into my recording device. “This is going to be long and drawn out, alright?”

We are sat behind closed doors in EA’s enormous private Gamescom business area where Mo, as he’s known, has just finished guiding a group of journalists and trade reps through a first-look video presentation of the shooter’s single-player story mode.

It’s a particularly noteworthy reveal as the first Titanfall game infamously launched without one.

This presented Mo and his team with an unprecedented challenge: how do you go about creating a campaign mode for a successful shooter predicated on expansive multiplayer?

“Coming off the first one, we had these really cool gameplay mechanics, right?,” Mo explains, referring to Titanfall’s signature combat cocktail of equal parts free-running foot soldiers and twenty foot-tall mechs.