Star Wars Battlefront 3 rumours

Battlefront 4, 5 and even early prototyping of 6 was canned. The studio took on additional staff to handle the large scope of the Lucas Arts deal. Activision about this time approached them for a Golden Eye project as they had former Rare developers. "As you can imagine that was something that was very well-received by a lot of the staff, it was going to be a great project to work on," said Ellis.

The studio had completed Future Perfect and Second Sight with around 70-80 staff, but had been rapidly staffing up - thanks mainly to a deal signed in summer 2006. "The people at Lucasarts came and found us," says Doak, "and said we'd like to talk to you. Guys like Jim Ward and Peter Hirschmann, who I still have tremendous respect for."

Jim Ward was then the president of Lucas Arts, and his strategy involved a 'reboot' of the company's own IP - hence titles like The Force Unleashed and the aborted Indiana Jones project. Another was Star Wars: Battlefront 3, and Lucas Arts wanted Free Radical to develop it.

"They had good but very ambitious ideas about technology," says Doak. "And they seemed like nice people. We were fairly disappointed with where we were with Haze, and so even though we thought we didn't want to do work for hire as a principle, the fact that the work for hire was Star Wars did make a difference - it's not a bad one. It was also a fantastic tonic for the troops at Free Radical, because you don't have to go very far in development to find someone with Star Wars shit on their desk. It looked like a marriage made in heaven."

The studio hunkered down to its most ambitious project yet. "It was going well," says Doak. "They wanted to massively upgrade the scope, and consequently we were being required to be very ambitious technology-wise - when you see those leaked videos of it you can see it looks spectacular."

The key idea of Battlefront 3 was that players could seamlessly transition from a small-scale gunfight into a space battle simply by climbing into a ship and taking off. "It was so ambitious because you had to populate an environment like that on a scale like that, so we had some tough nuts to crack," says Doak. "We were continually trying to improve that, and it was going well, in fact it was going so well that we were going to make two, and they were letting us do some really interesting stuff with the mythology."

'Trying to get anything into Haze was a battle of wills,' says audio director Graeme Norgate. 'Another guy said that trying to get sounds into the game was like papering a wall while the rest of the house is burning down. Haze had high ambitions and potential but the engine killed it.'

Battlefront 3 had started in mid-2006, and development continued until early 2008. Then things changed. "Steve and I began thinking that the dates were looking a bit tight for the first one," says Doak, "so we thought we'd do what we had never done before and let Lucas Arts know our concerns. Because Lucas Arts had been so good to work with, we thought they'd see the sense of what we were saying. And that coincided with Jim Ward not being there one day."

Internal forces at Lucas Arts had lost faith in Ward's 'reboot', not helped by new I Ps like Fracture failing to make an impact, and on 4 February 2008 he left the company. "That was worrying," Doak continues, "but it didn't seem like it would be a bad thing. We still thought we'd done the right thing. And then we went from talking to people who were passionate about making games to talking to psychopaths who insisted on having an unpleasant lawyer in the room."

The appointment of Darrell Rodriguez as president of Lucas Arts was announced on April 2nd 2008. He wasn't the only new face. Lucas Arts was making sweeping changes as part of a new strategy, the first step of which was cutting their outgoings in half. Huge numbers of staff were fired, an entire layer of management was removed, and countless projects were canned. "For a long time we talked of Lucas Arts as the best relationship we'd ever had with a publisher," says Ellis. "Then in 2008 that disappeared, they were all either fired or left. Then there was a new guy called Darrell Rodriguez, who had been brought in to do a job and it was more to do with cost control than making any games. And the games that we were making for them were costly."

The conversations with Lucas Arts became incredible, wars fought from different perspectives, and an internal video lampooned the attitude Free Radical was facing. Funny as that is, it's gallows humour - the effect on the studio would soon become no laughing matter. Any ally Free Radical had, like Lucas Arts' own UK producer, soon exited. Battlefront 3's development remained ongoing, and despite talks over the release date Free Radical was delivering on milestones.

An anonymous Free Radical Design employee's foul-mouthed tribute to Lucas Arts (warning: explicit language).

But Lucas Arts began to press hard on other, less quantifiable, issues. "Stalling tactics," says Graeme Norgate. "If a publisher wants to find something that is wrong with a milestone, it's very easy for them to do so as there are so many grey areas within a deliverable. If the contract says, 'Graphics for level X to be release quality,' who can say what's release quality? And there you have it."

"Lucas Arts hadn't paid us for six months," says Norgate "and were refusing to pass a milestone so we would limp along until the money finally ran out. They knew what they were doing, and six months of free work to pass on to Rebellion wasn't to be sniffed at." Part of the eventual agreement between Lucas Arts and Free Radical saw certain assets passed on to Rebellion Studios. For a time Lucas Arts was tempted by the thought of a hastily put together Battlefront 3, but nothing came of it. When presented with the allegations put forth by this investigation, Lucas Arts said simply that it does not comment on rumour and speculation.

'I've seen some people saying how can they cancel something that was finished,' says Doak, 'And to be fair [Battlefront 3] wasn't finished, but it was very far from a car crash and had interesting ideas. They had some edict from above about restructuring, had to save a certain amount of money per year, and there you go. Game over.'

"We had a lot of good people," says Doak. "We'd got ourselves into this situation where we had staffed up to fulfill these contracts. And Lucas Arts said to us, 'Well we've got rid of our people, you get rid of your people.' No, because I'm attached to my people. Some people who work for them did terrible things to us."

"In many ways it was a depressing farce talking to them," says Doak. "They had an agenda motivated by purely financial considerations. Their goal was to stop doing it. And it didn't matter that we had a contract that protected us. If we wanted to fight about it they were quite happy to fight about it, but it would be on their terms, on their turf, and we would lose not because we were wrong, but because... well, we wouldn't be able to ante up."

Lucas Arts wanted to find an exit, and the balance of power swung firmly in its favour. "What we found out in 2008 is that your contract is only worth as much as how far you can pursue it in court," says Steve Ellis. "Say the contract is, 'If publisher wants out, they have to pay X million pounds to developer.' Well, what if they don't? What are you going to do about it?"

Lucas Arts presented Free Radical with a choice. "The amount of time [court] would take was more than the money we had left," says Ellis. "So in practice the publisher wants out, and what they do is offer a fraction of that amount. And you either accept a smaller payment and hope to pull through one way or another, or you don't accept the payment and go out of business quite quickly." Free Radical had no choice at all.

The pressure on David Doak was unimaginable. "My role at Free Radical meant that I was simultaneously involved in these unpleasant 'high level' discussions with psychopaths who wanted to destroy us, and then the next day sitting with our dev staff at their desks trying to boost people's morale. Helping them to pass milestones that I knew would subsequently be manipulated to cause them to fail. It was the most depressing and pointless thing that I have ever been involved in. The dream job which I once loved had become a nightmarish torture."

"I found it impossible to reconcile that situation in my head and I had a nervous breakdown. I had to stop and take time off for the sake of myself and my family - ultimately I left the company I founded feeling like I had failed it."