“The allegation that we used the LucasArts money to fund the completion of Haze is false. Aside from anything else, we didn’t need to. When Haze slipped, Ubisoft supported us by increasing the dev budget to cover the extra time.
The suggestion that we kept our difficulties to ourselves is also false. [...] When it became clear that the design changes that we had mutually agreed to make meant that there was a risk to the end date, the first thing we did was to bring it to the attention of LucasArts senior management, almost a full year before the scheduled release. There was a lot of discussion and it was agreed to push back the release date. There were no secrets.”
Okay Steve Ellis, I’ve gone and associated you with the Rebels. You better not be telling dirty Sith lies.
What about that sweet “75 percent of a mediocre game” zinger?
“Again, false. [...] The game was ‘content complete’ and we were fixing bugs. [...] 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.”
Finally, Ellis gets a couple jabs in on LucasArts management…
“In 2008, LucasArts was a company with problems. Of course I don’t know the full details of or explanation for what happened internally, but some of the facts are clear: the entire management team who were there when we started working together were replaced in the first half of 2008. They made mass redundancies on their internal teams. They cancelled a number of projects. It was then that our milestones started being rejected.”
Phew, who to believe? My instinct is to side with Ellis, if only because he actually had the balls to use his real name, but some of his comments definitely smell of exaggeration and ass-covering. Anyways, I have a feeling this little spat may not be over, so stay tuned…
via GameSpot
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At least we’ll always have Empire on the 2600
Either way, we get boned out of a new Battlefront game. Which sucks because both of them were pretty fun games; nothing groundbreaking but fun for getting your shoot/star wars/nerd on.
My gut says the truth lies in between: BFIII was mostly finished, but LucasArts swapped out some executives and said executives decided to do what way too many executives in entertainment do: Establish dominance by urinating all over their predecessor’s projects.
It seems like the new management that was brought it did not like the idea of BFIII and decided to kill it with rejected milestones and the sort to throw dirt on it before pulling the plug. But i dont trust it was anywhere near 95% done when the axe came down.
They apparently didn’t like video games period because Battlefront wasn’t the only casualty after ’08.
Wow, I haven’t thought about HAZE in years. PS3′s first HALO killer, and boy howdy did it ever kill.
Am I the only person on the planet who likes The Force Unleashed II?
I am not a huge fan of the Force Unleashed series but I loved Republic Commando.