LOS ANGELES – It’s real, Titanfall 3 is real and I’ve played a full level of the campaign in a dream I had last night. Yes, it was a dream, but it was so real. Respawn Entertainment CEO, Vince Zampella, the entire workforce at Respawn, and you, the person reading this, were all there in my dream last night.
“We wanted to up the scope of Titanfall 2’s campaign, so we added Titans for your Titans. After calling down a Titan, you can now call down an even bigger Titan that your Titan can pilot,” Zampella explained, while wearing the shit out of some cat ears. “We’ve heard the complaints from the last game, so this time around we’re adding a mom friendly mode where players can call their moms from their Titan, or their Titan’s Titan at any point in the campaign.”
The early campaign level I played through featured all the trappings we’ve come to love from the underappreciated series, including you dear reader, harping in my ear about how “EA treats the series terribly” and how “Titanfall 2 is on the level of Half-Life 2”. Zampella stabbed you to death before returning my attention to the demo.
“You’ll also notice we’ve completely taken all the sound out of this one. That’s right, you’ve got to make all your own noises,” Zampella explained, before imitating the sounds that should be in the game.”BOOM! KAK KAK KAK KAK KAK KAK. Prepare for Titanfall. Zwoop THWOOOOOOOOMMMM DOOGE! BREEH. Titan online. BOOM BOOM BOOM.”
I joined Zampella, imitating his foley noises. I then looked across the space we were in. It looked like an outdoor food plaza mall-type thing, but it also didn’t look like any place you’d ever seen. I saw numerous Respawn employees. Some joined us in the noise making. Others wept, while wearing ripped clothing and playing with lightsabers. A man in a suit, at least, I think it was a man, his face was inhuman and incomprehensible, stood amongst the employees. He spoke to me, but his lips did not move.
“We’ve studied the market. People don’t want this,” the man’s words echoed through my head. “People want whatever we give them on FM radio, in the movie theaters, or on CBS’s prime time slot. The market has never been wrong. All hail the market. All hail the market. All hail the market.”
At press time, I woke up screaming in a cold sweat, but was able to put myself back to bed with the background noise of Big Bang Theory.
