Ex-Apex Legends and Titanfall leads form new studio, Wildlight Entertainment

A number of former Respawn Entertainment developers have announced the formation of Wildlight Entertainment, a new games studio.

The team, which is almost entirely made up of developers that have previously worked on Apex Legends or the Titanfall series, is currently hiring for several senior roles.

Leading Wildlight Entertainment is Chad Grenier, former game director of Apex Legends, who also served on the teams of both Titanfall games and the original Modern Warfare series prior to Respawn boss Vince Zampella‘s split from Infinity Ward.

Grenier is joined by multiple other former Respawn developers, who all left within the last 14 months.

That includes Mohammad Alavi, the former Modern Warfare and Titanfall designer who was attached to a single-player adventure game, said to be a cancelled Titanfall campaign, until his departure last year.

According to reports, a Titanfall single-player experience had been in the works for Apex Legends, but was cancelled this month.

Alavi is joined at Wildlight by Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends lead designer Carlos Peneda, design director Jason McCord, art director Jose Zavala, environment art director Robert Tuabe, lead technical artist Michael Cook and several others.

“We are a new, fully-funded entertainment studio hyper-focused on creating big, bold, original gaming universes of epic quality and scale,” reads a message on the team’s website.

“We’ve been quietly working on a new IP for some time, and while it’ll be a bit before we can say more, we’re beyond excited for what’s to come.”

According to Giant Bomb reporter Jeff Grubb, Respawn’s unannounced – and now, cancelled – Titanfall project was its attempt at getting a “Titanfall-feeling project” inside of its hugely popular free-to-player spin-off, Apex Legends.

The game, which was set to take elements from the Titanfall series and incorporate them with popular Apex characters, was reportedly officially cancelled internally by EA earlier this month.

At the same time, EA publicly announced the cancellation of Apex Legends Mobile and Battlefield Mobile, as well as the closure of mobile studio Industrial Toys and a delay for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

Staff who were working on the cancelled single-player game who couldn’t be repositioned in other teams would be given severance packages and laid off, Bloomberg reported.