Michael Barclay, who used to work on Star Wars Battlefront 3, tweeted over the weekend, “I feel like enough time has passed now for me to come out and say that Star Wars Battlefront III was going to be absolutely amazing, and the fact that it was canceled two steps from the finish line is an absolute crime.”
Barclay was talking about Star Wars Battlefront 3, which was being made by Free Radical until it was scrapped in 2008. He said this in answer to a simple question to the developers: “Well, developers, what chance do you think you missed?” Could it be a new game you wanted to work on, a studio you wanted to work in, or something similar?”
Barclay, who is now a lead creator at Naughty Dog, told his own story and added, “Players don’t know what was stolen from them.”
I feel like it’s been long enough now to come out and say Star Wars Battlefront III was gonnae be legit incredible and the fact it got cancelled 2 yards from the finish line is an absolute crime. Gamers don’t know what they were robbed of. https://t.co/zZUu8JR3iV
— Michael Barclay (@MotleyGrue) April 16, 2023
Battlefront III’s complex history
Barclay doesn’t say anything new. Steve Ellis, who helped make Free Radical, said in 2012 that Star Wars Battlefront 3 was “99 percent done.” This made a former employee of LucasArts attack the studio. Since then, the studio has gone through many changes and will reopen in 2021 under the name Deep. Silver.
He also said that Free Radical was always behind and that the game didn’t work in 2007, but that LucasArts was eager to make what was then a next-gen sequel to Battlefront on Xbox 360 and PS3 because Star Wars Battlefront and its sequel sold so well on PS2 and PS3. Xbox.
The accusations led to a war of words in the press, and Ellis responded with a long statement saying that the claim that Battlefront 3 was “75% normal game” was “false” and pointing to secret screenshots that he said proved it. He also said, “In 2008, LucasArts was a company that was having trouble.” Shortly after Ellis’s words, Disney shut down LucasArts. The company had bought the Star Wars brand the year before.
Over the next few years, several videos and even a playable version of the game came out, giving fans a chance to see what they were missing. In the end, many of those clips were taken down, and Battlefront III was lost to history.
Later, EA brought the series back, but it was very different from the original LucasArts games in ways like how it handled space battles. Fans still like the first Battlefront games because they put players in large-scale space fights where they can board and attack enemy home ships from different time periods from the original trilogy. It had a powerful single-player game, which EA games didn’t get until the sequel.