Star Wars Battlefront III canceled by LucasArts "psychopaths" according to dev

Whatever happened to the Star Wars Battlefront series? It was critically acclaimed, sold like golden hotcakes, and it was a rare boon for the Star Wars brand. So why don't we see it on store shelves anymore?

Free Radical director and co-founder David Doak opened up to Eurogamer to explain the sordid tale of the last 6-7 years of Free Radical's history. Which includes why Haze was a disaster, and why Battlefront 3 ended up canceled even though the gameplay videos looked incredible for the time they were made. 

 "It was going well," says Doak. "They wanted to massively upgrade the scope, and consequently we were being required to be very ambitious technology-wise - when you see those leaked videos of it you can see it looks spectacular."

In the Battlefront 3 videos, you can see the key hook of the game. The scope was so large that you could be in a gun fight on the ground, then hop into a starfighter and fly off into an aerial battle moments later -- all in real-time.

"We were continually trying to improve that, and it was going well, in fact it was going so well that we were going to make two, and they were letting us do some really interesting stuff with the mythology," Doak continued.

Up until that point, everything had been going fine, but according to the story, things hit the fan when LucasArts brought in a change of leadership. "For a long time we talked of LucasArts as the best relationship we'd ever had with a publisher," Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis told Eurogamer. "Then in 2008 that disappeared, they were all either fired or left. Then there was a new guy called Darrell Rodriguez [new CEO at LucasArts], who had been brought in to do a job and it was more to do with cost control than making any games. And the games that we were making for them were costly."

The hostile relationship that developed even caused Free Radical employees to make this video lampooning the money-hungry suits at LucasArts.

"And then we went from talking to people who were passionate about making games to talking to psychopaths who insisted on having an unpleasant lawyer in the room,” Doak said.

There's much more to the story, and it's a fascinating glimpse inside the normally opaque developer publisher relationship. Check it out over at Eurogamer.

It's stupid that companies do this to each other. Quite sad.

While it's very sad indeed as I loved Battlefront 1 & 2, didn't we already have one or two threads on this topic and story recently?

Maybe I'm mistaken.

I did post something about this recently, but SWBF3 threads tend to die fast on this site so hopefully a few more people will see this one. I have a bit more info here which is mainly the perspective of a dev at Rebellion (link here), and again saying that not only was SWBF3 cancelled, but a fourth game as well.

"Rebellion was signed up to produce PS2 and PSP versions of Battlefront 3; Free Radical, as you all know, was working on the next-gen (as it was then) versions. We'd work on hand-me-downs of assets from Free Radical (who, I believe, had had a while's head start?) to downgrade them to PS2/PSP quality and get them running on our builds. We were expected to mimic FR's game as best as we could given the weaknesses of the platforms we were developing on.

For whatever reason, Free Radical appeared to be having development problems. We weren't actually *receiving* the assets we needed to work with in a timely fashion, and what I heard about their builds was that they were looking mediocre, particularly for the development time which was being spent on them. That was in turn affecting our schedule; eventually we reached a point where we started to have to diverge from their design simply by virtue of the fact that we needed to keep working on *something*.

Increasingly, too, I got the impression that Lucasarts were unimpressed with FR's lack of progress. Rebellion were indeed planning to pitch to take over the project - those stories are true - but I got a very strong impression that FR's version was *already* dead in the water prior to that; given the timing of the cancellation announcement, I believe that Rebellion's pitch was more an attempt to save the game rather than to steal it. I'm biased, I admit, but it was so rapid a changeover that I have to surmise that Lucasarts' mind was already made up about the next-gen project.

Ultimately, Rebellion's Battlefront 3 became the PSP-only Elite Squadron. For a time we thought they were still going to go through with the PS2 version as well but at some point along the line that got canned in favour of presenting it as a side-game and a natural followon from Renegade Squadron.

My theory - and I must stress that this is entirely my own supposition - is that the vertical battlefield that was meant to be the lynchpin of the new Battlefront on next-gen was proving too ambitious to implement. I'm curious whether it was something that Lucasarts considered non-negotiable."

Wow, that information claiming Free Radical's builds were mediocre and not done on time pushes the point I made in the other thread even further.

My comment from there: "I'm not sold on this company, the last good game they released was in 2005 - After that they gave us Haze and eventually worked on Crysis 2. Just because this game was called Battlefront III doesn't mean it would have been good."

I enjoyed Elite Squadron too, although it was a bit much for the PSP. Rebellion could have done good with Battlefront III.

"..For whatever reason, Free Radical appeared to be having development problems. We weren't actually *receiving* the assets we needed to work with in a timely fashion, and what I heard about their builds was that they were looking mediocre, particularly for the development time which was being spent on them. [...]

Increasingly, too, I got the impression that Lucasarts were unimpressed with FR's lack of progress..."

"But LucasArts began to press hard on other, less quantifiable, issues. "Stalling tactics," says Graeme Norgate. "If a publisher wants to find something that is wrong with a milestone, it's very easy for them to do so as there are so many grey areas within a deliverable. If the contract says, 'Graphics for level X to be release quality,' who can say what's release quality? And there you have it."

'LucasArts hadn't paid us for six months," says Norgate "and were refusing to pass a milestone so we would limp along until the money finally ran out. They knew what they were doing, and six months of free work to pass on to Rebellion wasn't to be sniffed at.'"

The info from the Rebellion dev is just what he knows. He does say that he was a fairly low level employee, and so he doesn't know the whole story. What he says does seem to line up with the story we have now from Free Radical though.  With the change in management at LucasArts indeed happening around this time, it seems quite possible that the problems with the game weren't as much due to Free Radical, but more because of the new management. I still believe that the leaked footage we have gotten of the game shows that it was functional and that it would have turned out at the very least on par with the previous two games.

I do agree that Elite Squadron would have been better on console. Aside from the awful controls, the PSP just couldn't handle the ground/space tech that they were working towards (and which was working in the leaked footage from Battlefront 3).

Sad indeed. Battlefront 2 was probably my greatest Xbox game aside from Halo: CE and Halo 2. The replay value was simply incredible!

Hopefully they'll reboot the series somehow. It would definitely be a day 1 purchase for me.

Also, keep these threads coming! (as long as there's new information in them)

I read that as Battlefield 3

This article was such a heart breaking read especially since TimeSplitters 2 still is one of my favourite FPS games.

Aww man. i loved Battlefront 3.