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Noticed alot of talk about star wars battlefront 3 in these forums so this new story may be of interest.

Linky:

http://www.gametrailers.com/side-mission/40992/star-wars-battlefront-iii-was-99-done

Basically it was axed just before entering the QA-testing phase.

Didnt Know it was being developed by free radical, they have a patchy record but i believe they could have made an enjoyable game, aparently 'Haze''s multiplayer was pretty good, or at least had good ideas.

That article was originally saying "60% complete".

The fact that it was never officially announced or previewed suggests that it was dead faaaaaaar in advance of its cancellation.

I Was quoting the article title. Hence the quote marks.

Dubious about your Apparent Know-how regarding your claims. AFAIK you do not work in the games industry.

Do you know at what stage QA testing begins? I suppose wikipedia might have a page dunno.....

Not to mention Official Announcements are usually less than 1 year before game comes out, for example Skyrim. Smaller games less time, especially mid tier ones like this. It is only fairly recently that big games are being announced more in advance, Halo Reach and Bioshock Infinite being the first in years. The videogame industry is very different from the film industry in this regard.

 Perkustin wrote:
I Was quoting the article title. Hence the quote marks

And?

It does not change that the title was different originally. They get far more hits and discussion on their page by having a juicy title like the current one.

Dubious about your Apparent Know-how regarding your claims. AFAIK you do not work in the games industry.

What "claims"? I made a statement which is echoed by a lot of people. Battlefront III, if it really was "99% complete" would have been finished and released or sold off to be completed elsewhere. There was a lot of issues surrounding the game and its development, and the only people talking are ex-Free Radical employees and Free Radical themselves.

Do you know at what stage QA testing begins? I suppose wikipedia might have a page dunno.....

QA testing is pretty much done along the entire development process.

Looking at the screenshots, it's in at least the Alpha stage. That's 60ish percent through the game.

Not to mention Official Announcements are usually less than 1 year before game comes out, for example Skyrim. Smaller games less time, especially mid tier ones like this. It is only fairly recently that big games are being announced more in advance, Halo Reach and Bioshock Infinite being the first in years. The videogame industry is very different from the film industry in this regard.

Battlefront III was far from "mid tier".

The game was in development for how long? With nothing coming out until AFTER Free Radical lost the license to do the game?

There was a lot of controversy surrounding this game as more information comes out, but as I said...only one side is talking.

One doesn't need to be in the game industry to use common sense. No one gets a game to 99% completion and just cancels it. You don't spend all the money it takes to be 1% from profit just to cancel it. That's utterly senseless (It only makes sense if you have actually run out of money and Lucas Arts will never run out of money). Further Kan is completely right. There were no announcements, previews, trailers, anything shown about the game. Its development was never even announced until after it had already been canned (and it's only been 'announced' unofficially). There's no way in hell the game was that close to done. They'd have already started marketing.

Someone's spinning the truth.

I have no love for SW anymore but MAAAAAANNNN did I play a lot of BF2. Was very sad to see this get axed. Hope somebody brings it back.

I'm kinda shocked no one else has tried to make it...
Basically everyone I know would pick it up if they made it so why wouldn't someone else try and have a go? That said if they messed it up they'd be remembered forever as "Those guys who killed Battlefront"

Free Radical sat on the development for too long and tried to develop their own engine for the game.

If anyone wanted to "finish the project", they would have had to buy the engine in addition to the project.

At that point, it's cheaper for a big developer/publisher to just make their own game using a commonly licensed engine than it is to pay Free Radical for theirs.

 purplefood wrote:
I'm kinda shocked no one else has tried to make it...

That's kind of the $10,000,000 question. Even if Free Radical failed to produce the product for reasons unknown why hasn't Lucas Arts just handed it to someone else? It's like Nintendo deciding not to release another Zelda game or Microsoft deciding not to make another Halo. It's free money (Of course people said that about Duke Nukum Forever ).

 LordofHats wrote:

 purplefood wrote:
I'm kinda shocked no one else has tried to make it...

That's kind of the $10,000,000 question. Even if Free Radical failed to produce the product for reasons unknown why hasn't Lucas Arts just handed it to someone else? It's like Nintendo deciding not to release another Zelda game or Microsoft deciding not to make another Halo. It's free money (Of course people said that about Duke Nukum Forever ).

As I mentioned, Free Radical was developing their own game engine which they intended to license out after the game's development cycle was done.

They spent too long on that and it all went downhill from there.

I can't say I really buy that though. Plenty of companies have developed engines on their own and Free Radical had Lucas Arts at their back. I think there's more to the story, I just doubt we'll ever know what.

I can buy it.

Free Radical is known for wasting money.

Could have been something to do with the recent sale of the franchise, disney giving the no-no say in something they now own?

No, this was done looooong before the Disney/Lucasfilm deal happened.