Talking about leaks is a hard thing to do, especially as they begin getting more specific even before we’ve discussed whether or not the first details we’ve received are real.
I’ve been reading up a lot of various articles looking for reasonably interesting things to cover—talking about simple updates or the small changes in games is a pretty hard sell when it comes to writing an engaging article. Still, I look for pieces of “small” news because there are often some larger questions behind it. That brings me to today’s piece—a leaker by the twitter handle of @Osvaldatore tweeted out a list of “Titanfall 3 Info,” today, with a focus on some of the details in production. Osvaldatore claims that Titanfall 3 is “Almost Complete,” as well as specifying details about the game using Unreal Engine 5 and the modes available for play. The details come relatively sincerely—the post is not a joke, and Osvaldatore mentions in a reply that their, “Source is 100% sure about everything [they were] told minus the announcement/release dates, which [they] conveniently left out for this reason.”
I bring this up not because I’m very interested in the development of a new game by Respawn Entertainment, but because I thought about the ethics of reporting on something like this. I checked the poster and found that they were frequent leakers, as well as looking up various other articles to see how trustworthy they found this post. Even so, not a single trusted person can tell me without a doubt that Titanfall 3 is a real game that is on the way without the caveat of “leaks.” The information that is being shared is something actively withheld by people within a black box, a space of unknown that we cannot see into due to the secrecy of the work in the company. This is, of course, reasonable and occurs often. Games are developed in secrecy in the beginning because of the tendency to scrap or change things while in early planning phases—if you’ve created anything, I’m sure you’ve had ideas that simply don’t make it off the first piece of paper. This privacy with early ideas is reasonable and something I wish to respect, as well as something I would like with my own work if I was to be dealing with a long term project.
It’s for this reason that I struggle with the discussion of leaks—there’re a lot of games that are plagued by frequent leakers and data-miners to the point in which the upcoming content is almost a free flowing discussion despite the unfinished nature. Hoyoverse’s Honkai Star Rail has a sort of test build that has information of upcoming characters, and friends and I often use videos of it to judge whether or not we should be saving up our stellar jades for future banners. This information is relatively reliable when we’re a month or two out from the release of these banners, but droplets of far away leaks for characters such as Sunday’s early teasers that were many months before his banner’s first appearance. These leaks are much more unreliable and often contain whispers of a character that barely translate to the future release, and often may be of characters that could never release. I’m sorry to do this to the wanters, but Screwllum is a character that has been “leaked” often for over a year and has yet to find his way into a main release. Game files and voice lines can easily be created noncommittally and then abandoned, leaving red herrings for data-miners that cause information that is untrue to spread quickly through social media.
It’s this experience with leaks that gives me my perspective on Titanfall 3’s suspected engine—while the information surrounding Unreal Engine 5 is already unstable considering the experiences that gamers associate with it, would-be byers are now voicing concerns over it despite the fact that the information is unconfirmed and only let out through a leaker with an unknown source. To reiterate, people are upset about their unsupported complaints about an unconfirmed engine used to make a game we don’t even have confirmation is a real existing project. The information that we’re dealing with is such a strangely empty promise that people take as a reason to determine the results of the game’s launch sales despite us, once again, not knowing if the game is real. The discussion is strange no matter the likelihood of Respawn Entertainment creating a new Titanfall after the success of Titanfall 2, the likelihood of the leaker’s source being truthful with their information, or the likelihood of issues to be created due to the use of Unreal Engine 5.
While there’s a level of discussion to be had around leaks, the damage it can deal to a game’s reputation before launch can be unnecessarily harmful. If Titanfall 3 is to release one day and be using a different engine than Unreal Engine 5, there could likely be people who blame issues with the game based on the idea they have that it was built using it. It isn’t possible to police random strangers on the internet and tell them to be careful with their words on a product still in flux, but I believe there has to at least be a standard of discussion surrounding trusted sources and journalists. I know that what I’m currently doing is still an amateur level of coverage and my reach is minimal as of current, but I want to make note of this topic to hopefully help people thinking about what a leak’s value holds within the gaming sphere.
Anyways, this article was just a vessel for me to say that if Titanfall 3 is coming out I’ll buy that shit on launch.