With all the hype surrounding DICE’s upcoming Stars Wars: Battlefront as of late, it’s easy to forget that TimeSplitters creators Free Radical Design were originally charged with developing the third game in the Battlefront saga back in 2006.
Star Wars: Battlefront III was in development up until 2008, at which point it was effectively finished, before being canned due to the unwillingness of LucasArts to ‘spend big’ on marketing the game.
Today, thanks to Andrew Borman from Past to Present Online, six minutes of previously unseen footage from the PC version of the cancelled game are now available to view above.
Borman said:
“I revealed a lot of footage of the cancalled Star Wars Battlefront III in 2012 or so. Most of that video is still available:
http://ptoponline.com/?p=778Most people knocked the game’s graphics, despite the fact that I reiterated that this was a build 9 months or so before the game was canned.
I hadn’t given up on finding something later, but I’ll admit it was a bit slow going. Thanks to an anonymous source, though, I have a few more minutes of a much, much later build, which was still not optimized but showed a much, much better picture of what Free Radical’s version of Battlefront was going to be, for better or worse. It isn’t much to go off of, but it’s more than we have seen in years.
And I think it looks far better than people have ever given it credit for.”
On the basis of the footage released today, we’re inclined to agree.