Respawn wanted to let Apex Legends 'speak for itself'

- Lead producer Drew McCoy discusses the development of Apex Legends.

Eurogamer recently published an interview with Respawn Entertainment's lead producer Drew McCoy, who discusses the development behind Apex Legends, a new battle royale game set in the Titanfall universe, and how it came to fruition.    

McCoy knew right from the beginning that the idea of Apex Legends was going to be hard to sell to players initially, which explains the secrecy of its launch and minimal marketing to push the game.

"Our desire is to be completely open and transparent with our player base, and part of that expands to how we talk about problems, and we understand this game is gonna have a skeptical audience," McCoy explains. 

After all, many players were expecting a sequel to Titanfall 2. 

"There are some people who think there are too many battle royale games or it's a fad, the world thinks we're making Titanfall 3 and we're not. This is what we're making." 

"To try and convince a skeptical audience for months with trailers and hands-on articles, we're just like 'let the game speak for itself' - it's the most powerful antidote to potential problems," he continues. 

"We're doing a free to play game, with essentially loot boxes, after we were bought by EA, and it's not Titanfall 3. It's the perfect recipe for a marketing plan to go awry, so why have that - let's just ship the game and let players play."

McCoy also describes the challenge of designing a battle royale game without certain Titanfall pieces (namely the titans). The decision to forego specific abilities or items ultimately came down to a difference in goals between the core Titanfall games and the new battle royale.

"When we started [Apex Legends] we were building off Titanfall 2, and we didn't know we weren't going to have double jump or wall running or titans," McCoy says.

"The choice to not have those came about because of play-testing against our goals: to have a strategic, learnable, masterable, deep game."

Be sure to read the entire piece over at Eurogamer, which provides some more detail about the development of Apex Legends.