Where is Titanfall 3? The sad fate of movement shooters with video!

I’m currently having a lot of fun with two shooters that most of you have probably never heard of. We’re talking about Bright Memory: Infinite and Severed Steel, two futuristic first-person shooters from indie developers that made the leap from PC to consoles this week. And despite their completely different settings and gameplay orientations, they are very similar in one point: Both focus not only on shooting, but also and above all on fast and vertical movement. And as an old Titanfall fan, that got me thinking again.

Why is a feature as versatile and fun as three-dimensional movement used by so few shooters when just a few years ago it was the bandwagon everyone wanted to jump on? To answer that question, let’s first take a closer look at those few years: Do you remember the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare reveal trailer, which Activision and Infinity Ward launched in the summer of 2016 with unprecedented force at the time? shot leg? With an impressive 3.9 million dislikes, the clip is now number 28 of the most disliked videos on YouTube according to Wikipedia, and the ranking was even higher when it was published.

On the one hand, Activision had recently converted its predecessor, Black Ops 3, into a virtual casino with the introduction of purchasable loot boxes, but on the other hand – and even more importantly: the players were simply fed up with futuristic settings. This does not only refer to the choice of weapons and the map environments, but above all to the jetpacks that the Call of Duty soldiers have been equipped with since Advanced Warfare.

Many players didn’t like the fact that Call of Duty would use 3D-Movement for the third time in a row with Infinite Warfare.

Source: Activision




Double jumps, slides, running along the wall – while a shooter is only really interesting for some with such mechanics, many players just seem to get annoyed when the opponents also jump from above. This was evident not only from the Call of Duty debacle, but also from the lousy sales of Titanfall 2, released in the same year. And that’s despite the fact that many players who gave Titanfall 2 a chance still consider it one of the best to this day view shooters at all. Including myself!

The following year, Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski tried again with his multiplayer-only movement hero shooter Lawbreakers, and it failed even more badly than TF2 and Infinite Warfare had done before. Because despite positive ratings, Lawbreakers was played so little that the servers were shut down again just under a year later – no wonder with the number of players in the two-digit range! Since then, not much has changed in the field of movement shooters.

The quasi-Titanfall successor, Apex Legends, replaced jetpacks and wallrunning with battle royale and hero shooter mechanics, making it light years more successful than its predecessors. Call of Duty has stayed on the carpet since 2017 and currently rotates between modern war, cold war and WWII. What about Quake Champions? Dead. Hyperscape? Dead. split gate? Dead. Doom 2016 and Eternal? awesome single player, Dead multiplayer. I would also roughly include Halo Infinite in this group, but despite the free-to-play model, the number of players there is also the same pretty much in the basement.

Lawbreakers flopped as hard as you can flop. The development studio also had to close shortly after the servers were shut down.

Source: Boss Key Productions




So you might think that all the three-dimensional movement shooters were really just a phase, started by Titanfall in 2014 and buried by Infinite Warfare in 2016. If you count the good old arena shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament, the concept has of course been around for a lot longer. However, they no longer have any real relevance in today’s gaming landscape.

Let’s continue on page 2!