It's not too often that games in its final stages get canceled, especially when it's apart of a beloved and notorious series, but that's exactly what happened to Star Wars: Battlefront 3. According to Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis, the game was in its final QA before the publisher yanked it from further development.
Ellis, speaking to GamesIndustry, went on to explain that 2008's "layoffs and change of focus" at LucasArts attributed mainly to the company's decision to cancel the title. Free Radicals' relationships with LucasArts soured quickly as friendly contacts left, and were eventually replaced by employees who delayed payments and called for an entirely different direction for the series. To make matters worse, Ellis tells GamesIndustry that their studio was beginning development on Battlefront 4, ​which was apart of Radicals' deal with LucasArts inked in 2006.
"It was a change of direction for LucasArts as a company rather than for the games that we were working on. I think what had happened was the new management had been bought in to replace the old and given an impossible mandate. It was a financial decision basically and the only way they could achieve what they had been told to do was to can some games and get rid of a bunch of staff. So that's what they did but it was quite a long, drawn out process," said Ellis in the interview.
Source: [GamesIndustry]
