Star Wars
5 canceled Star Wars games that were extremely promising, yet no one will ever play
As big as it is, Star Wars has an issue with canceled games that leave fans in the dark after exciting showings and sudden cancelations.
Some were presented in style at fairs like E3; others changed studios and ended up stored in the drawer forever. There were even those that were never officially announced, although their existence was leaked afterward. Star Wars is a franchise that has not been immune to cancellations, some of which have been very painful for fans. The difficult situation of Lucas Arts in its last years and the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney accelerated the inevitable: the award-winning studio founded by George Lucas’ company closed its doors. More than a decade later, the fate of many of the franchise’s titles no longer depends on a single company, but on a wide array of different developers.
Star Wars Outlaws, the upcoming open-world game from Ubisoft Massive Entertainment, will go on sale on August 30. Before we embark on a new galactic adventure, how about taking a look at the projects that will never be?
Star Wars: Battle of the Sith Lords
Before Lucasfilm was sold to Disney, the now defunct Lucas Arts commissioned Red Fly Studio to develop Star Wars: Battle of the Sith Lords, a game known internally under the codename Damage that originally starred Darth Maul. At the time it was thought that the Sith Lord had perished in ‘The Phantom Menace’, but the developers were informed that Maul’s story would continue. Technology from ‘The Force Unleashed’ was used, playable prototypes were created and the plot was defined little by little. GameInformer had access to part of that gameplay.
The game was going to allow player to control Darth Talon, a Twi’lek Sith who did not fit well into the title’s chronology, since she lived more than a hundred years after Maul’s time. Thus, George Lucas proposed that the co-star be a descendant or clone of Maul himself.
Once the concept was finalized, the developers decided that the protagonists would be a descendant of Zabrak and Talon. About the gameplay, little is known, beyond the concept that it was going to implement more realistic lightsaber combats to avoid it being too similar to The Force Unleashed. Red Fly Studio lost contact with LucasArts when the Disney purchase was about to materialize. They still held out hope, although after the acquisition they were told that they were not interested in the project because their videogames would now be made by EA.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 3
Star Wars The Force Unleashed 3 was a victim of the closure of Lucas Arts. A spin-off of the franchise, whose second installment did not achieve great success among critics and the public. Its excessively short duration and somewhat dull plot revealed the problems within the studio. For the third installment, the developer worked on a more open concept than its predecessors, but it never went beyond the initial ideas.
Some details have been known subsequently thanks to Sam Witwer, the actor who played Starkiller and other characters in the franchise in animated series and video games. In a Twitch live with other creatives, it was revealed that the story would begin with Boba Fett hunting down by Garen Malek’s Rogue Shadow ship. Emperor Palpatine had his own plans and it seems that Starkiller and Darth Vader were on the line.
One of the conceptual ideas was to introduce a cooperative mode so that one player could control the apprentice and another the Sith master. In any case, Haden Blackman, formerly of LucasArts and founder of Hangar 13, assured that no concept art was even drawn, although there is a very early playable prototype on the Internet.
Star Wars Battlefront 3
The Battlefront franchise took two different paths: the classic one, led by Pandemic Studios, and the more modern one, with EA DICE at the helm. Neither one nor the other has reached the third main installment. Star Wars Battlefront 3 was in development since 2006, this time with the creators of TimeSplitters as developers. Free Radical had the ambition of bringing the massive battles of Battlefront to the then-new generation of consoles, Xbox 360 and PS3. The studio signed an agreement to design a fourth installment, which as you can all imagine, was never in production.
Free Radical struggled to meet deadlines and Lucas Arts had to pump more money into the project, but as time went on, Lucasfilm realized that Star Wars Battlefront 3 would never hit stores. Suspicions have never been completely dispelled: A former Lucas Arts employee accused the studio of diverting resources to the development of Haze, but Free Radical founder Steve Ellis denied this and said Ubisoft had taken over funding the entire project.
Ellis himself defended that Battlefront III was in the final phase of its development, while the former employee refuted this question and said that at most, the percentage amounted to 75% of a mediocre game. What does seem clear is that some game assets were used in Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron for PSP.
Star Wars 1313
There is an underworld within the Star Wars galaxy for organized crime. Underworld syndicates and gangsters control spice trafficking and the profitable business of bounty hunters. For a time, this facet of the franchise seemed to be under a curse: the Star Wars Underworld series was canceled, the Solo sequel was left in limbo, and Star Wars 1313 never saw the light of day. Luckily, comics and Star Wars Outlaws are here to fix that.
Star Wars 1313 was officially presented with a spectacular trailer at E3 2012. Developed using the Unreal Engine, the game left aside the Jedi to focus on a story of criminals in the heart of Coruscant, level 1313. From what was seen in the trailer and the leaked playable footage, the LucasArts production was committed to fast-paced combat, firearms, and “Gears of War” style cover shooting. It also had a spectacular Uncharted-style approach.
George Lucas suggested that the video game had connections with the Star Wars Underworld series, although in the end, it was neither one nor the other. Boba Fett, one of the most popular characters in the franchise, was going to be the main playable character, even though he was never conceived as the protagonist. And what happened so that it never came out? The purchase of Disney, the closure of LucasArts, and the multiple vicissitudes that the studio was going through. For a while, there was hope that someone would bring the project back, but even that faded.
Star Wars by Visceral Games
An action-adventure single-player game directed and written by Amy Hennig, the creator of the Uncharted trilogy. Visceral Games, the studio behind Dead Space, was chosen by Electronic Arts to develop this ambitious project. The company had the exclusive rights to the franchise and managed to release two installments of the Battlefront franchise, but this title suffered worse luck.
According to Amy Hennig, this title was going to allow the player to experience the story from two different points of view: through the eyes of the heroes and under the watchful eye of the villains, like in Indiana Jones. It was going to be spectacular, a blockbuster full of action and dynamism. Its producer remembered one of the levels and said that in one of them, the protagonist had to flee from an AT-ST in a spectacular chase scene: “You were running to escape from it on foot and it was trying to chase you, but you were more agile, sneaking through narrow spaces, destroying everything, crashing and using all the destruction possibilities of [the] Frostbite [engine]... You would have said ‘wow, it’s like a Star Wars Uncharted,’” said the producer.
At that time, the men in ties and jackets insisted that all video games should follow the same pattern, that of games as a service. Along those lines, EA Worldwide Studios President Patrick Söderlung said the following: “During the development process, we tested the game concept with multiple players. We have listened to their opinions on how they want to play while closely monitoring fundamental changes in the market. It has become clear that, to offer an experience that our players want to continue enjoying for a long time, we need to change the design”. This resulted in the closure of Visceral Games and the transfer of the project to another studio, which never completed it. Now, Amy Hennig has a new opportunity with Skydance New Media.
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