Star Wars: First Assault was Lucas Art's last ditch attempt in a two-prong plan to bring back the iconic Star Wars Battlefront series. First Assault was to be the first stage, offering an infantry focused, Call of Duty meets Resistance 3 style of shooting while retaining the iconic Star Wars style.
The title was nearly ready for release, and if Disney had been but a few months slower in the shutdown of Lucas Arts, it would have released on XBLA (and most likely Steam and PSN shortly thereafter).
This footage is from stage two of the Battlefront revival at Lucas Arts. Whether it was to have it's own title or simply be Battlefront 3 is unknown, it is however far closer to the original Battlefront games, but with a stronger focus on first person and vehicle combat styled more after Battlefield 3.
Air and space combat actually had more of a Rogue Squadron focus, offering what looked to be a far more arcade than realistic flight experience.
Now this one is truly obscure, to date I have only found three videos total of this, and only this video appears to remain. One of the other videos indicated this as being available on the original Xbox as a demo at one point in 2004, but there appears to be no other record of it's existence.
While the lack of any other records suggest it's potential as a fake, the sheer amount of custom animations, UI, and tech demo-like presentation suggests this may have been a game Lucas Arts was considering or had pitched to it. It also wouldn't be the first time Star Wars had a fighting game, as both the deplorable Masters of the Teras Kasi and the far more mildly received Episode III: Revenge of the Sith video game featured the chance to duel with lightsabers.
Free Radical's Star Wars: Battlefront 3. As far as cancelled Star Wars games go, this one is probably the most famous. Similar to First Assault, the developer claims the game was nearly ready for release. Claims to the contrary from an anonymous Lucas Arts employee cast some in doubt, as did pre-Alpha footage that was less feature complete than this alpha trailer from 2008, but we'll never really know.
Not only did this game's death hold back a new Battlefront game for years, but it helped lead to Free Radical's closure due to lack of funding towards the end of development. At least parts of the game escaped in the form of Star Wars: Battlefront Elite Squadron. You can see Elite Squadron's protagonist X2 and antagonist X1 (yes seriously those are their names) dueling and on screen for portions of the Clone Wars sections of the game, as well as the ground to space style of combat across maps.
Star Wars 1313 is still sorely in the mind of many gamers, both fans of shooters and Star Wars fans in general.
A graphically amazing demo with third person action akin to the Uncharted series was all we got of the first ever M-rated Star Wars game, intending to cover even more mature topics than Star Wars: Republic Commando. The story behind the game is something far from glamorous though. Originally intended as a companion game to the now in limbo Star Wars TV series, it was originally titled Star Wars: Underworld and would have been an open world game.
Later into development it was decided that it would star Boba Fett, leaving the original protagonists to star in the E3 trailer and nothing more. Eventually it transitioned again into the linear action game that we finally got to see, but due to the Lucas Arts shuttering, the game itself seems unlikely to return. Still, some believe EA's Visceral Games studio is attempting to salvage the project, due to both the hiring of Amy Henning and that they are known to be working on an unnamed Star Wars action adventure title.
Knights of the Old Republic 3 was a game a lot of Bioware and Star Wars fans wanted. What they would later get was the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. However, this was not always the case.
While references are rare, primarily in the Lucas Arts behind the scenes book Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts, a few pictures and details have been found from the game's pre-production stage of development. The pictured companion, Naresha, was one of the two known characters and is suspected to have been a companion character. The only other two hinted at characters are an unnamed woman and a droid known simply as Q-10. Planets that would have been visited included Mandalore in it's capital city, Rodia, Taloraan, Coruscant, and a new planet named Dashaad.
Little else is known about the game, although it's been strongly suggested by Bioware that key parts of the plot were later reused for The Old Republic MMO.
The most recent addition to the list, the cancelled Darth Maul game's history actually goes a fair ways back. Originally, a Darth Maul game was conceived even before Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and coincidentally was almost fully realized by Red Fly Studios, the developers of the Wii version of The Force Unleashed 2.
While plot details were scant even to the developers, it was clear that like Star Wars 1313, Maul's game was aimed to be a mature title, with decapitations, brutal stabs, and more. What's most perplexing though is George Lucas' input to have it be a "buddy cop" storyline between Darth Maul and Sith Lady Talon. Not only did the story conceit sound absurd, but the sheer timeline difference of roughly a hundred years between Talon and Maul as Sith Lords left the plot in a very dubious state.
Would Talon be retconned as having lived a hundred years or would Maul? Would there be some sort of time travel conceit? We'll never known, but if X1 and X2's shenanigans in Elite Squadron were any indication, maybe we're better off not knowing.
Published: Apr 11, 2014 09:44 am