A few days ago, Steve Ellis, the co-founder of the now defunct Free Radical claimed that the studio's last game, Star Wars: Battlefront 3, was 99 percent finished before it was canceled due to LucasArts' decision not to spend any money on marketing or advertising the game.
He says that the unreleased game simply needed bug fixing, and that it would have been the studio's most successful game, had the publisher only given it a chance.
Today, an ex-employee at LucasArts has told GameSpot a completely different version of the events that went down at the studio. Speaking under anonymity, the developer says that Free Radical had "misrepresented" its work on the game, and that it had "tested poorly with no focus on action," suggesting that Battlefront 3 had failed to live up to the publisher's expectations for the game. The studio had previously worked on Haze, a title widely panned by critics and players alike. This fact had given LucasArts good reason to be wary about the studio's promises.
“This 99 percent complete stuff is just bullshit. A generous estimate would be 75 percent of a mediocre game," said the anonymous developer.
"We were desperate for a next-gen follow-up to Battlefront (the claim that the project was sabotaged for financial reasons is ludicrous. The franchise was a huge money maker at the time). When Free Radical continually missed dates and deliveries, [LucasArts] made many ‘good will’ whole or partial milestone payments to keep the project going.
“At this point, I felt that Free Radical was akin to a Ponzi scheme where time and budget from the next game was being used to finish the previous, late, title.”
According to the former LucasArts developer, Free Radical had missed multiple deadlines and was unable to finish the game by its proposed April 2009 launch window, giving LucasArts little reason to keep funding its development.
Eurogamer reports that Ellis has since responded to these claims, insisting on his version of the events and reiterating what he said before.
“From the personal tone of the comments it is clear that the source is someone whom I personally dealt with. It’s unfortunate that they are making this kind of criticism while choosing to remain anonymous," said Ellis, who believes that blame for the game's cancellation clearly lies at LucasArts' feet.
"In 2008, LucasArts was a company with problems. The entire management team who were there when we started working together were replaced in the first half of 2008. They made mass redundancies on their internal teams. They cancelled a number of projects. Then our milestones started being rejected. We were told (and it seemed wholly believable given the aforementioned facts) that they could not afford to continue development of both BF3 and its sequel, so they negotiated the termination of BF4, then later BF3. There was no 'termination for breach.'
"If the problem really was that we had failed to meet their desperate need for a new Battlefront game, you might ask why after all this time they still haven't released a new Battlefront game using a different developer. I can only speculate."
All this drama about a game that never even saw the light of day.
