Lately, there haven’t been too many fantastic Star Wars games made in recent years. Star Wars 1313 looks set to be a PC exclusive title that only people running Borg cubes can afford to play, while The Force Unleashed released one of the worst and most underwhelming sequels of all time, sealing the fate of that franchise. One Star Wars set of games that did sell well though? Battlefront. And before it’s developer was shut down, a third Battlefront game was almost released.
Speaking to NowGamer, Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis says the game was just about done before an order 66 was submitted to kill the game. “It felt like we had turned a corner as a company,” Ellis said about the project.
We had had a dark period during the development of Haze, we’d had problems with our tech and we’d had some growing pains as we expanded to the size we needed to be, but it really felt like we were finally coming out of the other side intact.
We were making a game with very high ambition. You could start a battle on the ground, jump into a ship and fly into space, continuing on to dock in a capital ship and continue the battle there. We’d had to build all kinds of new tech and overcome numerous technical challenges and limitations but we had done it.
We had a 99% finished game that just needed bug fixing for release. It should have been our most successful game, but it was cancelled for financial reasons. I’m happy that people did at least get to see what we were working on and share the team’s enthusiasm for it.
What a pity. After flopping hard with Haze a few years ago, Free Radical had a hard time bouncing back, as most publishers avoided them, which also resulted in Timesplitters 4 never getting a publishing deal. And much like my Star Wars fan fiction, that third game in the Battlefront series will remain under lock and key, in a special safe, far far away…
Last Updated: November 30, 2012
