The Greatest Unmade Star Wars Game Of All Time Was Nearly Finished When It Was Canceled

As with the world of movies and TV, there are untold scores of promising video games that entered development and, for whatever reason, never actually saw the light of day. But for "Star Wars" fans, going on 15 years later, nothing hurts quite as bad as the loss of "Battlefront III" does. And we're not talking about a sequel to the version of the series that was rebooted after Disney purchased Lucasfilm. We're talking about the original "Star Wars: Battlefront III" that was scrapped by LucasArts in 2008. What hurts the most? The game was damn near finished when the plug was pulled.

Recently, Michael Barclay, the current lead designer at Naughty Dog (the studio behind the "Last of Us" video games) who worked as a developer on "Battlefront III" back in the day, decided to spill some tea on Twitter. Barclay responded to a prompt asking game developers to name the "one that got away" during their career. That's when Barclay hit a great many "Star Wars" fans right in the heart:

I feel like it's been long enough now to come out and say Star Wars Battlefront III was gonnae be legit incredible and the fact it got cancelled 2 yards from the finish line is an absolute crime. Gamers don't know what they were robbed of. https://t.co/zZUu8JR3iV

— Michael Barclay (@MotleyGrue) April 16, 2023

"I feel like it's been long enough now to come out and say 'Star Wars Battlefront III' was gonnae [sic] be legit incredible and the fact it got cancelled 2 yards from the finish line is an absolute crime. Gamers don't know what they were robbed of."

Sad to say, this is not the first time that someone who worked on the game has said something similar. Despite how far along the game was, LucasArts pulled the title from developer Free Radical's hands sometime in 2008 and "Battlefront III" never saw the light of day. We were, as Barclay suggested, almost certainly robbed of something truly special.

The "Star Wars: Battlefront" series kicked off in 2004 with the first game, which was available on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC at the time. It was a game that put players square in the shoes of soldiers on the ground in the midst of epic battles in a galaxy far, far away. More than anything, the game and its sequel, 2005's "Star Wars: Battlefront II," remain some of the best couch-multiplayer games ever, and not just the ones connected to the "Star Wars" franchise. The games were runaway hits and that's why a third entry was developed.

Unfortunately, things went south somewhere along the way with Free Radical. At one point, the studio's co-founder Steve Ellis said the game was "99% complete," but even that received pushback. Speaking to GameSpot in 2012, an ex-employee of the studio had some unkind words to share:

"This 99 percent complete stuff is just bulls**t. A generous estimate would be 75 percent of a mediocre game."

The unnamed individual further claimed that Free Radical continually missed dates and deliveries during the development of "Battlefront III." They added that the studio "was akin to a Ponzi scheme where time and budget from the next game was being used to finish the previous, late, title." At the time, the studio was also finishing up its troubled game "Haze."

Another ex-employee spoke with IGN in 2009 and explained why the game was axed, stating that "It certainly wasn't us that ****ed up." They added:

"We didn't do any press, they kept it totally under wraps. I think that was partly because they had 'The Force Unleashed,' they didn't want it to be contrasting with that."

As for the alleged issues? "From my experience with it, it had all the same problems with it that any normal game has at that point," they said.

At best, the situation with "Battlefront III" was a messy, complicated one. Regardless, even the most conservative estimates put the game at near-completion when LucasArts (Lucasfilm's gaming studio before the Disney purchase) canned it. Videos of the gameplay have surfaced on YouTube over time, offering a promising glimpse at what could have been. Even all these years later, it hurts to watch if you, like me, spent untold hours playing the original "Battlefront" games.

Everything special about "Battlefront" and "Battlefront II" can be summed up by what was so average about the rebooted version of the series. Those games, which released in 2015 and 2017, respectively, were largely online-based shooters that felt as though they were trying to be "'Call of Duty' in space" to some degree. That's an oversimplification, but they were modern shooters, plain and simple. The original games delivered memorable combat with remarkable level design that made for endless replay value. From a couch-gaming perspective, it simply doesn't get any better than duking it out with a friend on the Bespin Platforms in "Battlefront."

Nowadays, couch co-op or couch PvP is hardly considered in game development, it feels. And sure, that was a huge component of the old "Battlefront" games, but they were also true love letters to "Star Wars" that had a more genuine feel to them. Naturally, the graphics seem archaic by present-day standards, but that's not the point. "Star Wars: Battlefront III" could have built a bridge to the then-next-gen consoles, offering a better path forward for this beloved series. Instead, all that work was thrown on the ash heap never to be revisited again. It's a tragedy right up there with that of Darth Plagueis the Wise.