By: Darryl Kaye (@DarrylGU)
It’s been revealed that Star Wars Battlefront 3 and Star Wars Battlefront 4 were in development at British development studio, Free Radical, before the studio collapsed.
Steve Ellis, who co-founded the studio, broke the news while giving an interview on behalf of his new company, Crash Labs. “They [LucasArts] were big fans of our work, they liked our take on making games, they liked the way we work and they wanted to do this project,” he said. “It was a big thing, we were very excited and for a long time it was going very well.”
However, Ellis attributes the game’s collapse on a change of direction at LucasArts, as opposed to anything they changed on their end. “They brought in new people to replace them and all of a sudden we were failing milestones. That’s not to say there were no problems with the work we were doing because on a project that size inevitably there will be, there’s always going to be grey areas were things can either pass or fail. And all of a sudden we were failing milestones, payments were being delayed and that kind of thing.”
The result was LucasArts canning Battlefront 3, despite it being in the QA phase and Battlefront 4, which Free Radical had already taken on board extra staff to start developing.
Source: GI.biz & Gaming Union