A long time ago in an Internet far, far away, there was a game called Star Wars: Battlefront III being made by LucasArts and the Star Wars fandom rejoiced at its arrival. That time was the yesterdays of 2008 and since then the game’s untimely cancellation – and rather mysterious one at that – has spurred a wealth of leaked footage and screenshots online for our eyes to devour.
Just last week, YouTube snoop Chr0m3xMoDz uncovered what can be estimated to be the very best look we’ll ever be likely to get of the game’s pre-alpha phase and its over-all design to date. In it, there’s a variety of footage and gameplay encompassing Tatooine and what appears to be some very brief surface-to-air travel via a Republic gunship. The battle, no doubt set during the Clone Wars, features a few faces unfamiliar to players but carried some significance in the original script.
Chr0m3xMoDz assures players that the footage below is “a very early alpha build” of Battlefront III on Xbox 360 and that “if you aren’t a hardcore Star Wars fan, this probably isn’t for you.” The frame rate’s “pretty buggy,” he mentions, and that’s only more evident in how often our character ends up swimming in a sea of air. Knowing how many Star Wars fanatics have salivated playing any new console-level Battlefront, even
The gameplay footage in question looks rather authentic, sporting the usual assortment of menu options from single-player to multilayer on what looks like its original computer file from some office off in the boonies of Lucas Arts’ former headquarters. Even the loading screens scream Star Wars. Fans can further note the amount of iconic prequel enemies filling up the Tatooine spaceport, from Commerce Guild Spider-droids to Trade Federation AATs.
As we were warned, the frame rate’s rather slow, though for a pre-alpha build, that’s probably negligible. What’s intriguing is particularly the characters featured in the dialogue, namely “X1 and X2.” In what was rumored to have been pieced together from the fragments of Battlefront III’s story, Star Wars: Renegade Squadron on DS and PSP followed the lives of the creatively named, Force-sensitive clone troopers X1 and X2 from the prequel films’ Clone Wars to the original trilogy’s Galactic Civil War. The character’s dialogue in the game seems to imply you’re playing one of them.
Alas, Lucas Arts’ Battlefront is long past and now in the hands of EA and Battlefield developer DICE. The game is expected to arrive sometime in tandem with Star Wars: Episode VII‘s release next year, but EA’s warned that game will release “when it’s ready.”
What say you, reader? Was the original Battlefront III a game you’d dream of playing?