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Star Wars Battlefront 3 Footage Leaked
Prepare to Be Upset That Free Radical Is Gone
About a month ago, it was announced that Free Radical Designs, the developer of Star Wars Battlefront III, was closing its doors for good, canceling their development of Timesplitters 2 and shipping off development of Star Wars Battlefront III to Rebellion Developments, creators of Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron for the PSP. We later found out that while the status of those two games was correct, Free Radical was actually still alive, though in administration and working with less than one quarter of their previous staff. The fact that Battlefront III is still alive fills me with nerdly glee, but with Rebellion’s track record, I’m more than a little suspicious of their ability to craft a decent console game. Sure, Battlefront: Renegade Squadron was okay, but Rebellion has never done a PS3 or Xbox 360 game, and most of their PS2 offerings have been mediocre or worse.
This is doubly troubling when you consider the recently leaked footage of an early build of Free Radical’s version of the game. Take a look.
The on-foot action looks like pretty much what we expected, but the space ship battles; oh my goodness. From all appearances, levels seem far larger and more diverse than in either of the first two games, with multiple Star Destroyers in play at once and the ability to take flying vehicles much higher up than ever before. In play, it looks more like Warhawk than the previous SWB games, and that’s a good thing. There are also some nice-looking cut scenes that were never around before, as well as some lightsaber-wielders with whom I’m not familiar with (and that’s saying something).
Can Rebellion make a product that looks as good as this footage, which is from an internal alpha meeting back in November? Who knows. Hopefully, Free Radical sent over the existing code when they handed off the property, because the early footage is just awesome, and I’d hate to see this turn out like Call of Duty: World at War (Final Fronts) for the PS2. That was Rebellion’s last console game, and guess what; it sucked.
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Comments
That looks awesome, I hate Haze even more now.
I didn't much care for the spaceship parts in Battlefront II, but I had tons of fun playing it with friends. Hopefully this one won't get screwed up too badly under a new developer.
Look how sexy the scale of this thing is. It was beautiful watching him fly into the hangar of that Star Destroyer, land, and start running around inside of it. Epic written all over this one.
So unfair to use Star Wars music. You could put it over anything and the game would look awesome.
Seriously, leaking this is such a freaking tease. FR was such a great developer. Hopefully Rebellion can rise to the occasion and give us the game we deserve.
As much as I love battlefrount they ingame flight controls are very lacking I miss the Xwing Vs Tiefighter approach god I wish they would remake that game
Did I see a Slave-1 in there? Boba Fett playable? YES!