Nearly 15 minutes of gameplay footage from the canceled Star Wars: Battlefront 3 has turned up online, courtesy of YouTuber FuZaH. The videos were recorded in 2008 and feature the game's training mission, which has clone troopers X1 and X2 (who also appeared in Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron) flying starfighters, manning turrets, hopping a speeder, and even waving around a lightsaber.
The videos, with various bits of status text on the screen, placeholder warnings, and wonky graphics and voice acting, are clearly taken from an alpha build of the game. But the appeal doesn't arise from what it is, but what it could have been: A few of the comments in this Reddit thread, for instance, note the seamless (and very cool) transition from the ship in orbit to the surface of the planet. But that ambition may have helped doom the game, too: One redditor claims “this super awesome feature barely worked in multiplayer and FR [developer Free Radical Design] needed time and money to rebuild parts of the engine to make it work as advertised,” which LucasArts had no interest in spending.
Whatever the reason for its cancellation, the video makes me think the claim that Star Wars: Battlefront 3 was “75 percent of mediocre game” when it was cancelled is closer to the truth than Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis' assertion that it was "99 percent finished.” Alas, we will never know: FuZaH said that while he's got these videos, he does not have a build of the game.
