The Star Wars: Battlefront III Conundrum

Anybody who knows the video game world well enough will by now have heard the news: a prototype XBox360 version of Free Radical's doomed "Star Wars: Battlefront III" has made it onto the Internet. With it comes all sorts of interesting things. Already, talk of porting and finishing it for PC has begun and people are already trying to crack into the game's files to retrieve assets from them.

EA released a new Star Wars Battlefront game last year, and it did quite wel in sales. But it was always going to be missing something. It made the hardcore lament the unfinished Free Radical game, which, if finished, would have boasted a campaign, multiple worlds, two eras, and a new Galactic Conquest, as well as that now-famous seamless ground-to-space combat.

As I said before, somebody is undoubtedly going to try to finish it. EA will most likely not allow this. But here's the thing: EA should take a leaf from the book of another well-known video game developer/publisher when it comes to this particular game.

I am of course talking about Sega and their hiring of Taxman and Stealth to port the original Sonic the Hegdgehog games to newer systems. Now, of course, I understand there's a world of difference between a finished game that originated on a console well over twenty years old and a game that was never even released and not even acknowledged by the publisher.

EA, this is where you can earn big money. If you were to allow a team of people to port the game to PC, then to Xbox One and PS4, and release this game with a different Battlefront title and release it on XBL, PSN and Steam, you are guaranteed a boatload of money from people who desperately would love to play the finished product. It wouldn't need to be a disc release at all. Nor would you be obliged to bring the quality on a complete par with the environments in your new game. Jusst allow it to be finished.

Instead, you can rest assured EA will attempt to scrub any attempt at finishing what Free Radical started in a misguided effort to keep attention on their own game. That is what is sad: this game had a right to exist in the first place. Finishing and releasing it would act as closure to the old Battlefront franchise.