An hour of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 reveals cancelled game
Star Wars: Battlefront III was "pretty much done" when LucasArts cancelled the multiplayer Star War 'em up, developer Free Radical has said. A new hour of snazzy footage from a leaked build shows just how far along it was.
Star Wars: Battlefront III was "pretty much done" when LucasArts cancelled the multiplayer Star War 'em up, developer Free Radical has said. Almost a whole hour of snazzy new footage from a leaked alpha build shows just how far along it was, though fans should be warned it may hurt to see it so close yet so far.
The footage captured by Past to Present Online shows the Rebels and Imperials warring across Cloud City, Kashyyyk, Mustafar the Death Star, and other famed Warsian locations. It's a little rough round the edges, as one would expect from an alpha, and a bogged down by running AI bots, but still something to see.
Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis explained in April that a change in management at LucasArts brought a "change of direction" and the Star lords lost interest. "LucasArts' opinion is that when you launch a game you have to spend big on the marketing and they're right," he said. "But at that time they were, for whatever reason, unable to commit to spending big. They effectively canned a game that was finished."
Here's about as close as you'll get, then:
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replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, An hour of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 reveals cancelled game.
Star Wars: Battlefront III was "pretty much done" when LucasArts cancelled the multiplayer Star War 'em up, developer Free Radical has said. A new hour of snazzy footage from a leaked build shows just how far along it was.-
:'(
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"pretty much finished" can mean a lot of things. It might have been finished, but not at all fun. If it would have taken another year to make into a quality, releasable product, and sales estimates didn't justify that cost, it's easier to cancel and write it off.
Nobody kills a finished product if it's decent, no matter what the developer says.-
why speculate when the article mentions the reasoning?
"Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis explained in April that a change in management at LucasArts brought a "change of direction" and the Star lords lost interest. "LucasArts' opinion is that when you launch a game you have to spend big on the marketing and they're right," he said. "But at that time they were, for whatever reason, unable to commit to spending big."-
The "LucasArts pet project dying on regime change" theory is very strong, at least among the Giant Bomb crew. LucasArts only cares about unit sales; look at the bad quality of STFU2 and Kinect Star Wars, versus the strong sales of both titles, riding on the waning fame of Star Wars.
Also, don't expect the opinions of a producer at a major publisher to be neutral.-
I want to play Shut The Fuck Up 2
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I don't buy it, and until we hear someone from the publisher confirm it, we're only hearing one side. There's no way they killed a quality title that was finished. At bare minimum, they could have released it pc, digital only and made back some of their investment. Unless of course, it wasn't done, which is much more likely.
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In the video it definitely looks unfinished but nothing that would take that much longer to complete. Lucasarts is also notorious for changing management and the direction the company wants to go in every couple of years.
So maybe it's a little bit of both? -
I know a lot of people who've been put out on their ass by LucasArts regime changes over the years. They pull the same stunt every few years; cancel almost everything in progress and "set a new direction". It happened again in April and sent several friends of me back on the job hunt. (Along with industry greats - note that Clint Hocking "left" recently. Coincidence?) That company is totally broken.
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That is to say, LucasArts cares more about the Star Wars brand and staying "on message" with their latest corporate strategies than they care about any particular project, and they never put any value in completed work if it started under a previous regime. Scrapping a 90%-finished game rather than spend any marketing money seems par for the course.
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more like LucasTards.
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Was that the footage from yesterday? That game looked like it was in early alpha. It was no where near ready to ship.
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