Why Star Wars Battlefront 3 never happened

[CaseAgainstFaith]

Several former executives at Nottingham studio Free Radical have accused LucasArts of using "stalling tactics" to avoid paying the studio for its work on Star Wars: Battlefront 3.

Speaking to Eurogamer, co-founder and director David Doak, co-founder Steve Ellis, and ex-audio director Graeme Norgate described how a change of management at LucasArts was followed by obvious efforts to ensure Free Radical failed to meet development milestones, describing the people he dealt with as "psychopaths" and saying the saga led to him having a nervous breakdown.

LucasArts approached Free Radical in 2006, with then-president Jim Ward asking the Timesplitters studio to make Battlefront 3 as part of his strategy to reboot LucasArts IPs. After that strategy was deemed a failure, Ward left the company, and his replacements were, it appears, anything but supportive of Doak and his team.

"[Ward's exit] was worrying," Doak said, "but it didn't seem like it would be a bad thing. And then we went from talking to people who were passionate about making games to talking to psychopaths who insisted on having an unpleasant lawyer in the room."

Ward's replacement was Darrell Rodriguez, and in the months that followed LucasArts laid off huge numbers of staff in a bid to reduce its outgoings by half. "For a long time we talked of LucasArts as the best relationship we'd ever had with a publisher, co-founder Steve Ellis said. "Then in 2008 that disappeared, they were all either fired or left. [Rodriguez] had been brought in to do a job, and it was more to do with cost control than making any games."

http://www.edge-online.com/news/free-radical-execs-slam-lucasarts

tl;dr - LucasArts dropped the ball big time and really made themselves look like assholes.

Well this explains a lot.  It also makes me hate LucasArts.  Makes me feel happy I never bought their star wars mmo.

[RavynousHunter]

Honestly, LucasArts started sucking the moment they shifted from doing both Star Wars games, and other non-Star Wars games to just doing Star Wars.

What were once the gods of adventure games turned into a bunch of "let's milk Star Wars until its udders start hemorrhaging" assholes.  Not to say some of their SW games weren't good, I quite enjoyed Battlefront 2 on Xbox.

[VirtualStranger]

LucasArts were the ones who fucked up KotOR II, remember?

They just had to get it out by Christmas.

[Her3tiK]

Wow, really? Battlefront 2 was way better than the first one (which is weird given how bad most SW games I've played are). The fact that they gave up on BF3 is kinda depressing.

As long as this doesn't mean they're trying to make a new EaW. Those were just depressing.

[largeham]

Goddamn, BF2 was a great game. Good memories of playing it at 2am drunk in my friend's garage.

Also, what's EaW?

[CaseAgainstFaith]

Goddamn, BF2 was a great game. Good memories of playing it at 2am drunk in my friend's garage.

Also, what's EaW?

Empire at War.  It was a RTS game.

[RavynousHunter]

LucasArts were the ones who fucked up KotOR II, remember?

They just had to get it out by Christmas.

Wouldn't know, never played KotOR.

[Yla]

LucasArts were the ones who fucked up KotOR II, remember?

They just had to get it out by Christmas.

Wouldn't know, never played KotOR.

You know how everyone bitches about Mass Effect 3's ending? KotOR II's was worse.

(regardless of what you think about ME3)

[VirtualStranger]

LucasArts were the ones who fucked up KotOR II, remember?

They just had to get it out by Christmas.

Wouldn't know, never played KotOR.

You know how everyone bitches about Mass Effect 3's ending? KotOR II's was worse.

(regardless of what you think about ME3)

Nah. KotOR II's ending was incomplete, incomprehensible, and underwhelming but it didn't contradict all of the existing lore established up to that point.

[RavynousHunter]

Never played any Mass Effect games, either.  I also pay very little attention to their respective fandoms.  I pay very little attention to fandoms, in general, really...