This spring will mark three years since Respawn Entertainment was established by Jason West and Vince Zampella, the founders of Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward. While you wouldn’t expect development to have begun immediately at a brand-new studio, enough time has now passed that it seems reasonable to assume Respawn is fairly deep in development on — well, whatever it is they’re making. Over the past few years, we’ve gotten almost zero indication of what the studio is at work on. Besides some teaser images, early indications that the game would be on the scale of a “huge, summer blockbuster,” and EA’s statements that it will be a sci-fi-oriented shooter, there has been nothing of substance to go on. Knowing it’s a sci-fi shooter limits the scope of possibilities to a degree, but let’s be honest — neither of those details is specific enough to tell us much beyond the fact that it won’t be a historically accurate World War II RPG.
There are a limited number of conclusions we can safely jump to. Given this is an EA-published game and multiplayer is what made Call of Duty into the phenomenon it has become, it’s OK to assume Respawn’s mystery project will not be a single-player-only affair. Presuming it will be a first-person shooter, considering West and Zampella’s past with Call of Duty, and Medal of Honor before it, might be a stretch, though. For all we know, they, along with the many former Infinity Ward employees that followed them to Respawn, are interested in getting away from what they’re used to and, as a result, would prefer to make a third-person game. Gears of War might not be as big as Call of Duty or Halo, but it’s done very well for itself with that perspective.
