It’s hard to believe it’s been four years since Titanfall 2 was released, but that’s the milestone Respawn’s beloved sci-fi shooter hit on Wednesday this week. Since 2016 things have been pretty quiet on the mainline Titanfall front, with much of Respawn’s efforts channeled into spin-off Apex Legends: a game that emerged from tests for a battle royale mode in Titanfall 3, and which has since achieved a huge amount of success in its own right. But it seems the Titanfall sequel is continuing to influence the development of Apex Legends, as it turns out upcoming map Olympus was initially conceived for Titanfall 3.
Season 7 of Apex Legends is bringing a raft of major changes to the game – most notably new astrophysicist legend Horizon, community clubs, the game’s first-ever vehicles and floating city-in-the-clouds Olympus. The new map really is the main draw here, designed with verticality and vehicles in mind, and stuffed with the sort of opulent architecture you’d expect to find in one of the richest cities in the Titanfall universe. And although work on creating Olympus for Apex Legends began in Spring 2019, the idea itself is far older.
“At one point, there was a Titanfall 3 in the works after we launched Titanfall 2,” game director Chad Grenier told me in an interview. “And Olympus wasn’t called Olympus at the time, but that style of map was something that we were exploring for the next Titanfall game.
“While we were building Titanfall, we sort of discovered this battle royale game mode within that, our Titanfall universe. And we were just so excited about it that we ended up making Apex instead. So we have all of these maps… this very large map that looks very similar to Olympus. It’s the same style, sort of on the cutting room floor. And so we went back to that for sure. I think what we ended up with now with Olympus is better, since we’ve had more time to improve it.”
If you’re wondering just how much of the original Titanfall 3 idea was carried over to Apex, however, it seems the concept went through a fair bit of change.
“We didn’t really bring any of the old layout over, it was more of just an art style of that clean, futuristic city kind-of-look, the floating city in the air concept,” Grenier added. “The map is completely redesigned, the original concept was for a single-player level. And so it was designed very differently. But you know, a lot of that architectural style and the colour palette and the concept of this floating city did carry over.”