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Why cable is redundant: the Battlefront soap opera continues 05 Dec, 2012 / 2 comments

By Jason

We were aware that Star Wars: Battlefront III got well into development before it checked in to the Dew Drop Dead Inn, but in an interview with gamestm last week former Free Radical employee Steve Ellis decided to assign a provocative percent to the game's state of completion:

“We had a 99% finished game that just needed bug fixing for release,” Ellis told gamesTM. “It should have been our most successful game, but it was cancelled for financial reasons. I’m happy that people did at least get to see what we were working on and share the team’s enthusiasm for it.”

Considering that "99% finished" is a reckless claim for most of LucasArts' released products, it came as little surprise when a second source emerged to contest it. The source was a former LucasArts employee, and anonymously they dispatched a rebuttal to Ellis' comments to Gamespot for maximum exposure. This'd be the highlight:

"This 99 percent complete stuff is just bullsh*t," a former LucasArts employee who wished to remain nameless told GameSpot. "A generous estimate would be 75 percent of a mediocre game."

Such generosity could not go unobserved. Ellis sent Gamespot a lengthy response to the response (to be found in the same article) that reads, in part:

Objectively though, the game was 'content complete' and we were fixing bugs. At that stage in development, the way that completion is measured is by looking at the number of open bugs in the database. These are tracked and people spend a lot of time analyzing the fix rate and the rate of discovering new bugs and projecting a completion date when the game will be ready for release. At the time that the development on BFIII was stopped, the figures showed that we would close our 'must-fix' bugs with 3-4 weeks. So yes, maybe on reflection 99 percent was a little of an exaggeration. I probably should have said 97 percent or 98 percent.

Avail yourself of the whole drama, which if nothing else features fun candor from the sparring parties (the LEC source likens Free Radical to a Ponzi scheme) and sheds a little extra light on internal LucasArts circa 2008, which Ellis diplomatically describes as "a company with problems."

Source: Gamespot

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2 Comments

  • Avatar
    daltysmilth on 06 Dec, 2012, 16:10…
    It's not that surprising that Lucasarts would cancel a game that close to completion. What is surprising is that they would cancel a *Star Wars* game that close to completion.
  • Avatar
    clone2727 on 05 Dec, 2012, 01:59…
    99%? Hell, that's more than KotOR2 was.

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