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TimeSplitters 4 couldn't find a publisher through a haze of mistrust
We've been talking about TimeSplitters 4 since 2007. We guess that's better than talking about TimeSplitters 4 once in 2007 and then never again, but it's still tedious when no news other than, "Sure, it's still in development," comes out of Crytek.Crytek bought series developer Free Radical in 2008, following the studio's closure. At the time, TimeSplitters 4 couldn't find a publisher because its story was too complex, series co-creator Steve Ellis and Karl Hilton, a former Free Radical staffer now at Crytek UK, tell GamesTM."TimeSplitters 4 was in the very early stages of development when Free Radical went into administration," Ellis says. "A small playable demo was shown to several publishers, but it didn't attract any publishing deals."Hilton says Free Radical's FPS flop, Haze, contributed to publisher hesitancy. Marketing people would play the demo, and then ask what happened with Haze, stressing a lack of trust in the studio."Secondly, their marketing person would say something alone the lines of, 'I don't know how to sell this,'" Hilton says. "The unanimous opinion among all publishers that we pitched TimeSplitters 4 to is that you can't market a game that is based around a diverse set of characters and environments – you need a clear and easily communicated marketing message, and TimeSplitters doesn't have one. Perhaps they are all right. Perhaps this is why the previous games in the series achieved much more critical success than commercial success. For these reasons, one by one they all declined to sign the project."Earlier this year Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said that public interest in TimeSplitters 4 was high, but "not high enough yet."
This is what happened to Star Wars Battlefront 3
Despite our infinite sadness that TimeSplitters 4 is not in development right now, at least we have some closure regarding developer Free Radical Design today. Steve Ellis, one of three individuals who left Rare after the completion of GoldenEye 007 on the N64 and founded Free Radical Design, has shed some light on what happened to the UK-based developer – and why we never got Star Wars Battlefront 3, even though Free Radical basically finished it in 2008."It was a big thing, we were very excited and for a long time it was going very well," Ellis told GI.biz in an interview that focuses on the rise of Free Radical and how it eventually became Crytek UK. "That was a big deal for us because it meant putting all our eggs in one basket. It was a critical decision – do we want to bet on LucasArts? And we chose to because things were going as well as they ever had. It was a project that looked like it would probably be the most successful thing we had ever done and they were asking us to make the sequel to it too. It seemed like a no-brainer." But then things got a bit rocky due to a shift in LucasArts management. Key individuals left the company and suddenly things were looking grim for Free Radical's Battlefront 3."LucasArts' opinion is that when you launch a game you have to spend big on the marketing and they're right. But at that time they were, for whatever reason, unable to commit to spending big. They effectively canned a game that was finished." As of March 2008, Free Radical had a competent working build. "It was pretty much done, it was in final QA. It had been in final QA for half of 2008, it was just being fixed for release," Ellis concluded.
