The long-awaited third installment of the Star Wars: Battlefront series never materialized, and the game’s original developer has spoken up about why.
Star Wars: Battlefront has been an incredibly successful series for the brand since its debut in 2004. Unfortunately for fans, it never made it to a third version, regardless of how long it ran or how it was revived. In part due to the immense popularity of the Andor TV series, the player count for DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront 2 has been going up recently, indicating that the game’s enduring popularity is not surprising given its age.
Playing the games over and over again is a hit with fans since there’s no better way to relive the most memorable Star Wars battles. An original Star Wars: Battlefront 2 developer has spoken out about the reasons for the series’ long-awaited third installment’s non-materialization. Star Wars: Battlefront II was originally developed by Pandemic Studios, but fans didn’t see any new content until EA and DICE revived the series a decade later.
Designer Dan Nanni of Star Wars: Battlefront II spoke with VideoGamer and discussed why Pandemic’s take on the third installment in the series was shelved. While it’s common knowledge that Free Radical came close to completing Star Wars: Battlefront 3 a few years down the road, few will be aware that Pandemic, the original developer, had a similar game in development earlier. Nanni announced, “We started working on it, and then negotiations just didn’t take off.”
Similar to the one-year interval between the first Battlefront and its 2005 sequel, a one-year production cycle was sought. The launch of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 happened at the same time, making a one-year gap very difficult to bridge. Making a game on a new console isn’t as simple as porting one from an older one. You never know what you’re up against until you have it, since new consoles come with new hardware, and that hardware has new constraints.
I believe that the desire for additional time to work on it was the main reason why negotiations came to a standstill. Nanni called the possible Battlefront III from Pandemic “cool,” saying it had the same space-to-ground premise as the scrapped version from Free Radical. With “given the time, we’d have made something really special.”
Eight years since the last game was launched, there is growing momentum for DICE’s franchise to eventually become a trilogy, which is a tragedy for those who never got to play that version of Star Wars: Battlefront 3. The fans of Star Wars Battlefront are attempting to show EA how much they still want a new game by getting everyone to jump in and do their part. I don’t care if it ever materializes or not; I do know that fans would gobble up a new Star Wars Battlefront game.
