It seems as though Star Wars: Battlefront III may not have completely died with Free Radical Design after all, but rather has lived on as unfinished playable code. New evidence indicates the long-canceled project still exists in some form, which means it has the potential to be pursued by Disney, LucasArts’ new owners.
Over the “May the 4th be with You” weekend, two sets of game footage found their way into the public domain. The first, courtesy of PtoPOnline, was a live stream of alleged game footage for Star Wars Battlefront III. PtoPOnline, as Game Informer puts it, is a site dedicated to “coverage and streaming of pre-release games, betas, and canceled projects.” Naturally, a game such as Battlefront III would be worthy of attention in their eyes.
In addition, some alpha reel footage of the game, apparently recorded by Free Radical back in November of 2008, was uploaded to Vimeo by the user Blue_Monkey. Blue_Monkey claims in the description that the video was given to him “by an ex ‘Free Radical’ team member” and that the large-scale Republic cruisers featured in the footage had “full crews of real players.”
All of this hopefully points to a possible Disney-authorized resurrection of Battlefront III, which fits in with the recently announced outsourcing of Star Wars-themed games to Electronic Arts. Granted, Disney is also focusing its efforts on promoting and supporting Star Wars Episode VII, so the chances of seeing Star Wars Battlefront III before 2015 are slim to none. Still, this new footage at least gives us a glimmer of hope that the game will someday resurface.