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Quote:Star Wars: Battlefront 3 canceled due to 'change of direction' at LucasArts, dev claims
by Steve Watts, Apr 26, 2012 9:45am PDT
Related Topics – Star Wars Battlefront 3, LucasArts, Free Radical, Star Wars Battlefront Series
Despite a good deal of buzz and fan expectations, Star Wars: Battlefront 3 never materialized. We've seen bits of the game through leaked media and alpha footage, but the game never found release. Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis has finally shared more detail on just what happened to the project.
"We were still at that time probably a year out from releasing the first game and they asked us to sign up for the sequel," Ellis told Games Industry International. "That was a big deal for us because it meant putting all our eggs in one basket. It was a critical decision - do we want to bet on LucasArts? And we chose to because things were going as well as they ever had. It was a project that looked like it would probably be the most successful thing we had ever done and they were asking us to make the sequel to it too. It seemed like a no-brainer."
But the deal between the companies was bolstered by a strong relationship between Free Radical and key LucasArts figures: president Jim Ward and product development VP Peter Hirschman. After internal changes resulted in both of them leaving the company in 2008, everything had changed.
"The really good relationship that we'd always had suddenly didn't exists anymore," Ellis said. "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."
He says the new management at LucasArts was a "change of direction" for the company. "It was a financial decision basically and the only way they could achieve what they had been told to do was to can some games and get rid of a bunch of staff. So that's what they did but it was quite a long, drawn out process."
Ellis says the first contracted game was "pretty much done" and in final QA, and just needed some more tweaking before release. "LucasArts' opinion is that when you launch a game you have to spend big on the marketing and they're right. But at that time they were, for whatever reason, unable to commit to spending big. They effectively canned a game that was finished." Plus, Free Radical had already staffed up for its second project, and had to lay off those staff members too.
The project has been dead for years without signs of a revival, despite early rumors of a new developer. But at least now Battlefront fans can know more about how the project sunk.
tldr they cancelled a finished game because they couldn't be fucked to market it
RE: Star Wars Battlefront 3 cancelled despite being effectively finished
Fun fact: Since Free Radical failed on Haze due to Ubisoft being an impatient little boy and not letting them even finish the game, Lucasarts were absolutely sure that Battlefront 3 would fail. Even though members the of Free Radical created Goldenye, Perfect Dark, and Timesplitters.
Lucasarts was the main reason for shutting down Free Radical and I hate them even more than I hate E.A. However, I also hate fucking Crytek who wastes Free Radical's talent on fucking Homefront 2 and won't let them make any good games. Also, that Steve Ellis quit game development and that Pussy Dave Doak went onto to make a game company called Pumpkin Beach who specializes in (not) making children's games for Wii and Facebook./rant
(This post was last modified: 04-27-2012 10:45 AM by fish20.)
RE: Star Wars Battlefront 3 cancelled despite being effectively finished
(04-27-2012 10:44 AM)Fish Wrote: Fun fact: Since Free Radical failed on Haze due to Ubisoft being an impatient little boy and not letting them even finish the game, Lucasarts were absolutely sure that Battlefront 3 would fail. Even though members the of Free Radical created Goldenye, Perfect Dark, and Timesplitters.
Lucasarts was the main reason for shutting down Free Radical and I hate them even more than I hate E.A. However, I also hate fucking Crytek who wastes Free Radical's talent on fucking Homefront 2 and won't let them make any good games. Also, that Steve Ellis quit game development and that Pussy Dave Doak went onto to make a game company called Pumpkin Beach who specializes in (not) making children's games for Wii and Facebook./rant
fun fact:
crytek hold the rights to timesplitters
04-27-2012 08:20 PM
Thanks given by:
fish20
Penguins are birds
Posts: 1,347
Joined: Nov 2009
RE: Star Wars Battlefront 3 cancelled despite being effectively finished
(04-27-2012 05:10 PM)Efs Wrote: I imagine this will eventually be leaked into the public and we get a free game.
Because you'd be pissed as a dev if your work is gone in the trash.
Hope so man.
Again lucas arts takes a shit on something that could have been good.
Quote:After key people left, the executives killed all game development.
Back in the heyday of the 1990s, LucasArts was one of the good guys. Titles like X-Wing, Jedi Knight and Monkey Island were pillars of PC gaming, but then something happened. Star Wars Battlefront, an FPS with third person elements released in 2004, was an extremely successful game for LucasArts and the 2005 sequel performed equally well. But after Jim Ward left the company, the plans for a technically ambitious Battlefront 3 from the British studio Free Radical went sour. Free Radical bosses David Doak and Steve Ellis say every effort was made to sabotage development by the people running LucasArts in 2008.
"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," said Doak.
"For a long time we talked of LucasArts as the best relationship we'd ever had with a publisher," said Ellis. "Then in 2008 that disappeared, they were all either fired or left. Then there was a new guy called Darrell Rodriguez, 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 plans for Battlefront 3 were radical, pardon the pun, and the development cost a lot of money. Somewhere along the line, LucasArts decided they couldn't afford to make the game former studio head Jim Ward wanted to make. But they couldn't just cancel the game because of the contract in place, so instead they just tortured Doak and Free Radical until their spirits broke.
From Free Radical's point of view, the studio was delivering milestones for Battlefront 3 on time, but LucasArts quibbled over the game assets being actually ready. "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?" asked a Free Radical employee.
In this way, LucasArts refused to pay Free Radical for more than six months, until the developer ran out of money. That ended up being a very successful tactic because Doak couldn't afford a long legal battle. "If we wanted to fight about it, they were quite happy to fight about it, but it would be on their terms, on their turf, and we would lose not because we were wrong, but because... well, we wouldn't be able to ante up.
"In many ways it was a depressing farce talking to them," said Doak. "They had an agenda motivated by purely financial considerations. Their goal was to stop doing it. And it didn't matter that we had a contract that protected us."
Finally, after many deals including the GoldenEye remake fell through, Free Radical went into administration, laid off 140 people and was eventually purchased by Crytek.
It just goes to show that publishers can engage in some very tricky tactics when tens of millions of dollars are on the line. It's not about the games or the developers, then, just the bottom line.