When LucasArts terminated their contract with Free Radical Design (nowadays known as Crytek UK), the studio was not only working on Star Wars Battlefront III and Time Splitters 4. Instead, the company started the pre-production of another Star Wars Battlefront game.
As the status of Star Wars Battlefront III (Free Radical version) is currently unknown, we do not expect any news about a fourth SW Battlefront game in the near future.
Thanks to Hey Hey.
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Time Splitters 4 was the fourth installment of the FPS series developed by Free Radical Design. Sadly Free Radical “shut down” on December 18 2008. It was later confirmed that the company had gone into administration, leaving 40 of the original 185 staff still employed, but the future of Time Splitters 4 has become uncertain and maybe it will never be finished and released. The studio was bought by Crytek, the developers behind the Crysis series and Free Radical have changed their name to Crytek UK. It’s currently unknow if TS4 could ever be finished and released by Crytek. [Infos from Wikipedia]
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TimeSplitters 4 was not only planned for PS3 and Xbox 360 but also for Wii. The game was planned to be a “down-sized” version with several new gameplay elements due to the unique control interface. While most of FRD staff was working on the large PS3 and Xbox 360 version, only a small team was responsible for converting the assets for Wii.
When Free Radical Design filed bankrupty, the project was shelved.
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In 2006, LucasArts announced an agreement with UK-based and now shut down developer Free Radical Design. Although no further announcements were made about the game, it was well known that FRD was working on Star Wars Battlefront 3 for next-generation platforms.
Several issues including delays and “communication problems” made LucasArts cancel the project and leave Free Radical Design without funding. As a result, the studio had to close in December 2008 as publishers showed no interest in either buying or investing into FRD.
While Star Wars Battlefront 3 will be finished at Rebellion Studios, the other FRD game (TimeSplitters 4) will probably not appear in the near future.
In April 2012, more screens and videos from an alpha version of Star Wars Battlefront 3 Free Radical version were shared online by Past to Present Online
Also as we can read from PC Gamer:
Betagames have found remnants of a Battlefront project in the form of images stashed away on the Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City disk. That seems like an odd place to leave some spare files, but Raccoon City developers, Slant Six were rumoured to have been working on the third game in the Battlefront series for a while. The files include a variety of pro-quality loading screens and some odd bits of texture work, including a hideous image of Luke Skywalker’s face stretched out on a 2D plane. Eeeugh.
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TimeSplitters is a FPS developed by Free Radical Design (now known as Crytek UK) and published by Eidos on October 2000 in North America as a PlayStation 2 launch game. Below you can see are a couple of beta videos of the original Time Splitters, that seem to have some differences from the final version!
Thanks a lot to pacloser97 that noticed some of the beta stuff in the first video below:
The differences I am noticing are, in the full game there is a crosshair, the the guns move when turning, the first laser weapon shown seems to have a little less of a tint of red in the full game, the weapon shown at 0:36 doesn’t look like its final version counterpart, the level shown at 0:51 doesn’t look like its in the full game 0:55 also looks like a whole new level as well, at 1:31 at the top left screen the sniper isn’t in the full game.
Thanks to MicroChirp for the contribution!
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