A playable, 99% complete version of the cancelled game Star Wars: Battlefront III has found its way online, thanks to the tireless efforts of a group of game preservationists.
Now, in case you’re understandably confused, I’m not referring to EA’s Star Wars Battlefront games, but rather to the original LucasArts published Star Wars: Battlefront series.
The fact that a third entry into LucasArts’ Battlefront series was cancelled at one point in time has been common knowledge for a while now.
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Although the title was never officially announced, Steve Ellis (co-founder at developers Free Radical Design) confirmed in 2008 that the game did exist at one point in time.
Ellis revealed that work on Star Wars: Battlefront III was “pretty much done” but had to be cancelled at the last minute, as LucasArts didn’t want to commit the budget to the marketing campaign.
Since then we’ve seen a few gameplay leaks pop up here and there for the cancelled title, such as back in 2012 when IGN was forced to remove leaked gameplay footage from their site following a legal notice.
We’ve got a little bit more than just a gameplay leak today though; we’ve got the whole bloody game.
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Free Radical Design Archive, a team of folks who are “dedicated to Free Radical's cancelled games”, has released a fully playable build of the Wii version of Star Wars: Battlefront III online.
“This build, made in the final week of development, is full of content that has not been seen before by fans,” revealed Free Radical Design Archice.
“As this game was cancelled during development, there are still bugs and issues which we hope can be resolved through future modding.”
I have absolutely no idea how they got their hands on this, but I’m extremely glad they did. Considering that the game essentially looks complete, it would have been a massive shame for this to have never seen the light of day.
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Almost makes me wonder if, just maybe, one of the former staff members at Free Radical sent this their way…