Free Radical’s Battlefront 3 is dead. Period. – Says ex-Employee
Some fairly interesting news that will be a big disappointment to a lot of fans.. apparently the Star Wars: Battlefront 3 that was in production with Free Radical will never be released. One of our forum members (Thanks Red7 StandingBy!) found an email address of an ex-Free Radical employee and decided that he would shoot him an email asking about what happened with the production of Battlefront 3.
Here’s the email that was sent:
From: my email
CENSORED
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:23:54 -0500
Subject: Big Fan
REMOVED I hope this email finds you well.When you were at Free Radical you did an awesome job at re-inventing the Star Wars Battlefront franchise. It was so sad and upsetting to hear of Free Radicals collapse. Myself and thousands upon thousands of fans were so pumped when we saw the leaked footage of the supposed alpha meeting in November of 2008.
We finally had something to look forward to after years of lackluster titles from Lucasarts. Now BF3 is in development hell and the fans want answers but as usual Lucasarts doesn’t listen. I was wondering if there is anything you could tell me about the whereabouts of BF3 now, how far along it was and I would be interested to know where you are currently working or where you last worked. Thanks again and may the force be with you!
Here is the response that came back to him:
Thanks for your kind words, BF3 was truly awesome.
The whole idea with BF3 was that is was going to have a storyline, following two clone brothers that was cloned from a Jedi. The game also had a vertical battlefield, so you could fight on the ground, jump into a x wing and fly up to a star destroyer, firing ion cannons from space to ground or from ground to space, all this without any loading times.
Sad to say that about 6-8 months from completing the game, Lucasarts canned it, I don’t know all the details about what happened but it got cancelled and that was the death of Free Radical, we couldn’t get a publisher in time for Timesplitters 4 so the directors where forced to make 80 % of the company redundant. Then later on they got bought up by Crytek and are now developing some AAA titel. I was one of the guys that was made redundant so I am not working at Crytek anymore but at a different games company.
The status of BF3, well the BF3 I was working on will never get released, however I believe that Battlefront being one of the major titles for Lucasarts, you will no doubt see a battlefront title at some point, what format, what type of game it will be, that I cant answer, because I dont know.
May the force be with you!
Talk about a major bummer, but this still doesn’t confirm that we won’t be getting our long awaited Battlefront 3. This just means that version that Free Radical were developing, won’t ever surface. So basically all of those leaked renders and screens are what could have been and never will be now.
This really sucks because Free Radicals version looking absolutely amazing. Even if LucasArts are working to recreate Battlefront 3, they’re going to have to work really hard to match what Free Radical had done. It makes me wonder why they would can the project when it was almost ready… strange.. Let me know your thoughts folks!
I wanted to address the people as well who are sending me emails and posting comments that they know when Battlefront 3 is coming out and how they have “sources” that it’s being developed. Don’t bother unless you care to “share” your sources and where you got the info from, because they’ll just be deleted.
Thanks!
P dumped even teh rocket launcher award?
I’ve never goten a rocket launcher award weapon….
But i never play singleplayer either. I had award rifle and was gettin close to award shotgun when i discovered the wonders of online play!
LUCASARTS MAKE SWBF3 ALREADY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This bites…
It’s nearly certain that ‘more than one’ game is getting revealed at the VGAs. I am 99.5% positive that one of them will be The Force Unleashed 2. Why? Because I know someone who is working on it, and has been for the past 8 months.
Then there’s that alleged Clone Wars (TV series) free-to-play MMO, too. Who knows. The odds are fairly good that BF3 may get confirmed, and the odds are very good that BF3 won’t get confirmed. :/
yea i know dave… i will boycott lucasarts products. As will thousands of other people.
its funny. I come on this site every day just hoping that maybe some news of BF3 has been posted here. But I just keep getting my hopes up for nothing. If lucasarts doenst announce BF3 they are going to get so many complaints from the fans. this game is universally known and would make a huge profit for lucasarts. so why dont they just make it?? youd think that if they werent making the game that they would post something saying that they honestly arent working on this game so people would at least know and stop making such a big deal out of it. so sense i havent seen anything i believe that its still out there somewhere.
well, there goes another shot.
but you have to think, it could be something to hide the fact it is there, but the odds of this are not good at all to say the least. lucasarts, if they do not end up making this game, needs some new management. (i dont want anyone fired, dont take that wrong)i think this game would sell very well if they did well with it. all they need is to make it with awesome visuals, and tweak the gameplay to make it more, intense and real feeling i guess. other than that, awesome games.
I only have Bf2 for Xbox. I don’t use Xbox live either.
(Plus I have Legendary on all medals.)
But I do think there is some relation between ES and Bf3.
Humm… does anybody else get the feeling that something fishy is going on behind the scenes here? Two big studios get closed for being related to BF3; lucasarts refusing what would’ve been one of the best games ever released with the “star wars” brand…
In my humble opinion, either L.A. doesn’t want another SBW at all or they want to make it themselves to regain credibility.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to see what will happen on December 12
LucasArts have turned from being respectable to a backstabbing company. They are an indirect result of Free Radical falling into administration. Now they risk putting the entire Battlefront series in jeopardy seeing as how they opted for Rebellion’s ‘cheap-and-efficient’ routine of development. I’m praying for Battlefront not to flop.
Like I said earlier, this title just keeps getting pushed back…..
CAUSE LUCASARTS IS Stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now that I have my anger out,
P dump whats your battefront 2 prooflie name??
I play battlefront2 very often, although less and less people are playing this great game…..
For those of you who just simpliy cant wait for new battlefront material, go to BattlefrontFiles.com (pc users only) THey have thousands of custom maps and mods to play!!!
Did you know that more Battlefront III stuff (concept and the like) from Free Radical’s version has been found? It’s all reportedly from the build of the game in 07/08 prior to the axing, but it looks cool. I found posts about it here this past week:
http://xcastonline.com/index.php/News/rumor-even-more-star-wars-battlefront-iii-concept-art.html
http://www.pcgames.de/aid,700198/LucasArts-Neues-Star-Wars-Spiel-wird-im-Dezember-enthuellt-und-Bilder-zu-Battlefront-3-aufgetaucht/PC/News/
Bummer. Hopefully LA can bring it back to life.
Well, this makes me want to shoot the guy who canned bf3. If he walked up to my door he’d definitely loose his perfect nose.
Hopefully it turns better on the 12th with some new game coming out, but I doubt now that it will be bf3 with starting from scratch in a year.
what is with your obsession with trying to make Battlefront 3 turn into Elite Squadron?
No, I don’t thinl it’ll be a new force unleased. The did the Ultimate Sith Add. so I don’t expect anything from that soon.
And this is quite a big stink for a Force Unleased spinn-off.
It’s a big installement.
One thing that makes me think that the new game is Battlefront III has to do with Pandemic’s closing. When the studio shut down last week, EA promised continued support for Pandemic’s intellectual properties, and Battlefront is one of those IPs.
When the rumoured Battlefront III surfaced, it did so on the trail of Free Radical’s closing (which was rumored to be the developer on the title). At the time word was that Battlefront III went back to Pandemic after Free Radical was shuttered. Now that Pandemic’s closed, I believe EA’s doing the same thing with Battlefront III that it’s doing with Mercs Inc: Take a few core members from Pandemic, drop them in another EA studio, and get the game ready to go gold sometime next year. What do you folks think? Is a new Force Unleashed more or less plausible?
BF3 is till here may be it was sent back to lucusarts then sent to rebeilan 4 a have cooked idea but I still say that bf3 will appear ar vga 2009 with a better teazer than before with a better story line.
Wow this sucks… i swear if bf3 is not announced now, I will never buy a single Lucasarts game ever… untill BF3 comes out.
this is complete bull. i hope that SWBF3 is announced at VGA. Lucasarts should obviously see how much SWBF fans want this game to come out. the “vertical battlefield” is the most amazing features that could be put into a SWBF game. I believe that if the continuation of this dead version of SWBF3 would be the smartest choice lucasarts could make. Even people that didnt buy the 1st and 2nd SWBF would buy the 3rd. this game needs to be announced soon!!!!!!!
Total crud… I need time to think about this.
This employee blames Free Radical’s closing on the dumping of BF3 (excuse the pun).
I think this shows that there is some relationship between BF3 & ES. So don’t expect the BF3 that comes out to be the same.
I do think that Free Radical’s template went to ES.
Now, please excuse me, I gonna go play BF2.
well this really sucks. I don’t understand why they would can the entire game. I mean come on SWBF 1,2 were the best selling Star Wars games. On the Lucas Art website fans have been barking at Lucas Arts games to make Battlefront 3 for a while now so who know what will happen now. So all I can hope now lucas arts uses Free Radical’s version as a template rather than starting from scratch. I know its a very long shot but I hope its the new Star Wars game annocued at VGA is Star Wars Battlefront 3.