Two new videos popped up online recently featuring well over 10 minutes worth of gameplay from the alpha build of Free Radical Design’s take on Star Wars: Battlefront 3, also considered to be the real Star Wars: Battlefront 3.
YouTuber FuZaH popped the videos online, featuring a playthrough of the story mode trainning missions in the game, and you can check out both videos below. The game was being made for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.
As you can see, the game is clearly not finished and was cancelled well before they could complete a lot of the features.
The interesting part about the game is that the cinematics blend in with the in-game play. It’s actually pretty cool. The part where the player walks through the hangar and the Clone Troopers salute them is really neat.
The training segment sees players getting a crash course in flying out in space, getting a really extensive view of the large playfield and the ability to seamlessly transition between on-foot play and vehicular combat. No power-ups required here.
The really awesome part is that it shows a game with so much potential that was clearly wasted. The DICE version of Star Wars: Battlefront clearly looks better but gameplay wise the two versions couldn’t be further apart. The loading-free transition from space to ground and the ability to go back and forth in a dynamic environment showcased what a real next-gen vision of a Star Wars game should have been.
Unfortunately, we ended up with the DICE take on Star Wars: Battlefront, which was a huge far cry from what Pandemic had accomplished and what Free Radical was proposing with their version of the game. The large-scale, boundary-free maps and the actual feeling of being in a massive battle environment looked like the sort of true successor to Star Wars: Battlefront 2.
Sadly, I doubt we we’ll ever get a game like the one presented in the video above. It aimed to take everything that Battlefront 2 accomplished and then multiply it by several fold. DICE’s Battlefront took everything Pandemic accomplished and then scrubbed out all the good parts leaving a gorgeous but very hollow and boring shell.
This alpha footage is just another showcase to remind gamers of the sort of fun gameplay they didn’t get last gen and they certainly aren’t getting this gen.
