Something that has been prominent in the Titanfall franchise are wall running and the massive Titans (obviously).

Well, Apex Legends has neither of those things, which was quite shocking, but it turns out that Respawn had pretty good reasons for dropping both after playtesting.

During our conversation with Respawn’s design director, Mackey McCandish, we asked why they dropped both wall running and the Titans.

WHY IS THERE NO WALL RUNNING?

“I mean that’s a great question. We use a very open prototyping phase and action blocks when we’re trying a lot of new ideas. We’ve got all our past work from Titanfall and Titanfall 2 to draw from so naturally there’s periods where we’re trying a lot of different combinations of our past ideas with future ideas. And wall running was enabled, but we wanted to make a game where you can anticipate player action, build a plan around and try to get a drop on an opponent – and be rewarded for getting that drop.”

“Mechanics that made it harder to anticipate and predict player actions were fighting that, so we took high manueveribility options and we made them character abilities.or we made them map specific like the drop towers. So if you see a drop tower you go ‘oh there’s probably people around’, or it’s Pathfinder, you see a robot and you start thinking somebody could be on the roof (due to his zipline ability).”

“When everybody could wall run and double jump that made it harder to anticipate, and in the long run it also made the game be about that manueveribility to it brought the geo closer together and created tunnels and because we didn’t want to create that style of game, it made less sense to keep it in”

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WHAT ABOUT THE TITANS?

“I see, well this takes place in the Outlands which is kinda the outskirts of the Frontier in Titanfall and it’s after the war. During the war, yes, the IMC are pumping out titans, afterwards that’s not true. We’re on the outskirts, we’re far away from that military-industrial complex and they’re just not on the minds of people that live in this area. It’s in the past.”

“The Legends of the arena are the people that live in that area, or have moved to that area, that have various specialties. It’s not so much “where’d the powers come from?”, each character’s story is unique. Wraith was experimented on, she’s mastered phase technology – I mean there’s pilots that used phase technology in Titanfall 2 as well. It is technology based, Wraith is using a gadget when she phase shifts like in ‘Effect and Cause’ (a level in Titanfall 2’s campaign) you’re using a device to shift into a different time.”