"..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).
