Leaked footage of the canceled Star Wars: Battlefront 3 depicts the likes of Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia fighting it out on Hoth and Coruscant, a reminder of what the game would have looked like if TimeSplitters developer Free Radical Design (now called Deep Silver Dambuster Studios) would have remained at the helm of the project.
Related: Star Wars Video Games: Past, Present and Future
Star Wars: Battlefront 3 was set to be the next entry in the hugely popular squad-based third-person shooter series, before Lucas Arts went out of business and the Star Wars license was promptly snapped up by Disney Interactive. The game is now in the hands of EA and Battlefield developer DICE, though pre-alpha footage of Free Radical’s Battlefront 3 has popped up online before, highlighting the seamless ground-to-space combat that the team was working on before the game was canned.
This latest batch of footage puts an emphasis on the Jedi/Sith battles that were introduced in Star Wars: Battlefront 2, depicting gameplay based upon the Battle of Hoth featured in Empire Strikes Back and the city planet Coruscant. It also features Darth Vader twirling his lightsaber around, and some hilariously poor placeholder voice acting.
Watch the videos below:
While this is pre-alpha footage and therefore isn’t indicative of what the final product may have looked like, I can’t help but notice that the Jedi/Sith gameplay is incredibly familiar to what was featured in Battlefront 2. While playing as the Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul and the like was undoubtedly fun in that game, it was very basic and felt more like a half-hearted implementation than something which really added to its gameplay. If DICE manages to actually make us feel like Jedi in the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront (as is the tradition with reboots, the 3 has been dropped), then we’ll stop longing for this game that never was.
