Respawn Entertainment has had a very busy past day or so. Yesterday, the EA developer both announced and released its brand new free-to-play battle royale game, Apex Legends. Featuring a colorful cast of characters, the title is set in the same universe as the Titanfall series, which has led many to wonder exactly why there aren’t any Titans to be seen within the game, alongside some of the more obvious series staples such as wall running and double jumping. Thankfully, the developer was on hand to reveal the ‘why’ behind these gameplay decisions.

The news comes by way of a recent interview with PC Gamer, wherein Respawn’s executive producer Drew McCoy sat down to discuss some of the details on Apex Legends. According to McCoy, the battle royale title is far removed from the Titanfall series, enough so that while some elements were brought over, the two IP’s remain separate. “A lot of the stuff [from Titanfall] that was brought over was brought over purposefully. Our goals are really to make a masterable, learnable, deep game with a lot of strategy,” he revealed.

When we first started making it, to be completely honest, we had double-jumping and wall running. We had triple-jumping for awhile. We had Titans in tons of different forms. For us, we don’t restrict ourselves when we’re early on in a project about what ‘has’ to be there.”

So, why then aren’t see seeing any Titans at launch? “”So even though we were like, yeah, this is probably going to be the Titanfall universe, we didn’t put any hard requirements on what had to be there,” he said. “While prototyping and playing and iterating, things stay or they go as a result of whether or not they’re achieving our goals.”

Things like wall running and double-jumping, they actually really hurt the strategic and learnable aspects of combat. Because a player can get anywhere almost immediately. So there’s no thought process like ‘okay, I saw someone run around that building, now I know they’re going to be in one of two places.’ No—with double-jumping and wall running, they can be anywhere.”

This in turn is what lead the developer to choose a 3-person squad-based game, yet another choice that sets it apart from other battle royale titles. Drew McCoy took things one step further by relating the game’s multiplayer to that found in Titanfall 2:

I love Titanfall and Titanfall 2, I’m incredibly proud of especially Titanfall 2, but that’s a very common Titanfall feeling in multiplayer: ‘Oh, someone was 300 feet in the air and they just snipered me in the head as they were flying over. They’re having a great time and I’m just like, ‘I guess I shouldn’t be under people who are flying.’ There was really a lack of learnability to those mechanics from a combat standpoint. So that’s where a lot of this stuff came from, was trying to make a game that felt learnable and strategic.”

Apex Legends is now available free-to-play for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

So, thoughts on the developer’s reasoning for setting some mechanics apart from the Titanfall series? What do you think about Apex Legends so far? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!