Previously unseen footage of Star Wars Battlefront III, the canceled game from shuttered TimeSplitters developer Free Radical Design, has surfaced online.
Shared on YouTube by user FuZah (via Reddit), this is described as video of an “unfinished alpha version” of the game. I avoided using the word “new” above because the video was reportedly recorded in 2008; sadly, FuZah says they don’t have an actual build of the game, or else they would have already shared it online.
That leaves us with a pair of videos (totaling just over 13 minutes) showing gameplay of a tutorial mission. The visuals are obviously subpar by today’s standards, being so many years old, and it’s quite rough, with frame rate drops that are to be expected from an in-development game. Compounding those complaints are the numerous lines of on-screen text (many of them displaying errors) that wouldn’t be seen in the proper game.
That said, what we do see is impressive, showing how you can seamlessly fly a ship around in space and then exit it onboard a larger ship. The action then moves from space in the first video to ground combat in the second clip.
While we’ve seen video of Battlefront III several times now, LucasArts never actually confirmed that it was ever in development. That hasn’t stopped there from being a great deal of discussion and drama around the project over the years, though.
EA now controls the rights to make Star Wars video games, and it’s taken the Battlefront series in a different direction. A fan-led attempt to essentially remake Battlefront III ran into rights issues earlier this year, with its developers now intending to create the same game without using the Star Wars license.