In real-life she’s Respawn’s community manager. Not all former Infinity Ward vets are leads on Titanfall, she reveals, and they aren’t gunning for Call of Duty.
While of course they hear others say it could be a ‘COD Killer’ - ”we’re not blind” - the team didn’t take that approach. They wanted their own mark left, hopefully.
”…we’re just doing our own thing. People just want to focus on Titanfall, we don’t want to make someone else’s game. It’ll be interesting to see what influence Titanfall has on shooters, and if it makes any lasting contributions to the genre, I think that’s really cool, but we don’t do anything like - it’s not like keeping up with the Joneses!” Heppe told OXM.
The studio now turns its attention to post-launch support and of course downloadable content. Respawn has acknowledged before the evils of on-disk DLC unlocks and the like, and promised that’s not something they want to get into. In fact they’ll be releasing some new content at no charge.
”All we’ve confirmed so far is maps,” she said. ”There are definitely other possibilities, I don’t think the idea is just to limit it to maps. We’re also going to do free updates, private matches and stuff we’re going to be adding in for users and not charging for. I understand why I probably should have an answer for that, but we’re still trying to figure out that sort of stuff internally and some of that stuff comes from feedback from the community and what people want from launch.”
”…nobody wants to have a disc and then have something that’s unlocked on the disc and be like why are you charging me for something that you shipped with the game? We don’t touch that; that is scary community territory. But that said, we’re a multiplayer game and you have to support multiplayer games after launch.”
”The community wants it, We want it, and it certainly is the standard. But again, some of that comes from - ‘OK, you guys have played the game now, what did you like, what do you want’, and seeing what we can feasibly do within the time periods that we have to get it done.” Check out the full interview between Abbie Heppe and OXM.
Titanfall releases on PC and Xbox One last week and helped rocket Xbox One console sales in the UK 96%.
