As calls for Star Wars Battlefront 3 grow stronger, an ex-Pandemic dev explains why the original games never got a third entry: "We started working on it and then negotiations just didn't take off"
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Star Wars Battlefront 2 is having a resurgence in popularity at the moment, with calls for a sequel to the 2017 DICE-developed title to come out being so strong that even former devs are getting in on it. But it wouldn't be the first Star Wars Battlefront 2 to not get a sequel, as the mid-2000s version of the series also never made it past the number 2 (and no, I'm not counting the squadron games on handhelds). A Pandemic Studios follow-up never surfaced, and Free Radical Design's take on it never came out despite being allegedly very close to completion.
Battlefront 2 designer Dan Nanni claims that Pandemic did in fact start working on a third game, but a breakdown in communication with LucasArts is what caused it to never happen. "We started working on it and then negotiations just didn't take off," Nanni told VideoGamer, adding that the one-year development time of the previous two games wouldn't fly a third time due to the transition to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
"When you're moving to a new console it's not as easy as saying, 'let me just make a game for it like we did for the old console'. New consoles have new hardware and new hardware comes with new limitations and you don't know exactly what you're working with until you've got it." Nanni added, "I think, negotiations stalled out because I think we wanted more time to work on it. But obviously, Lucas was also trying to align it with their own marketing beats."
One of the big elements found in the leaked Battlefront 3 from Free Radical was the inclusion of missions that took place in both flight and ground sections. Nanni told Videogamer that this was actually in the cards for Pandemic's version too, "We had some tech on it that was pretty fun. And was working really well," adding "in Battlefront II we had space missions and we were like, 'well, what's the evolution of that' and everyone was like 'well, it's ground to space'. A big battlefield that is Star Wars all the time."
Nanni said that if the team had been "given the time, we'd have made something really special." Pandemic would move on from Star Wars, with the closest thing to a sequel from the studio being The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, which adapted the gameplay of Battlefront into a better property. After that, it was the underrated WW2 game The Saboteur before EA threw the studio into its big landfill of shuttered studios. "We cough up a chunk of our soul": 32 game devs, from Doom's John Romero to Helldivers 2 and Palworld leads, explain what people get wrong about games.
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