Star Wars: Battlefront 3 Was "99% Done" Before Cancellation

Remember the canned Star Wars: Battlefront 3 game that Free Radical was working on (a video of which, SPOnG revealed, unveiled some very cool technical features and gameplay mechanics)? It wasn't that far away from completion when the deal with LucasArts was binned. It was about 99 per cent done, in fact.

"It felt like we had turned a corner as a company," ex-Free Radical founder Steve Ellis told gamesTM (via NowGamer), regarding the atmosphere of the studio on the lead-up to the game's cancellation. "We had had a dark period during the development of Haze, we’d had problems with our tech and we’d had some growing pains as we expanded to the size we needed to be, but it really felt like we were finally coming out of the other side intact.

"We were making a game with very high ambition. You could start a battle on the ground, jump into a ship and fly into space, continuing on to dock in a capital ship and continue the battle there. We’d had to build all kinds of new tech and overcome numerous technical challenges and limitations but we had done it.

"We had a 99% finished game that just needed bug fixing for release. It should have been our most successful game, but it was cancelled for financial reasons. I’m happy that people did at least get to see what we were working on and share the team’s enthusiasm for it."

Former employees of the studio have been quite vocal as of late, with Ellis and others also voicing their thoughts on the company's inability to find a publisher for TimeSplitters 4.