star-wars-battlefront posts

A lot of folks thought we might get an official announcement of Star Wars Battlefront 3 at last night's Video Game Awards. But the action game sequel, still not officially announced by publisher LucasArts, might still be in play. Fan site Battlefront3.net claims they got an email from a casting director Chris Marazzo who told them, " . . . Battlefront 3 is also in development. It was by far the most fun and coolest casting I ever worked on."

The first two games in the Battlefront series, developed by the now shut down Pandemic Studios, were highly successful in terms of sales. Free Radical Design was supposedly working on Battlefront 3 but LucasArts is rumored to have pulled the game from the developer last year. The developer was close to shutting down before being acquired by Crytek.

Has LucasArts suffered a huge setback in its future plans? That's what Kotaku claims. According to what they are reporting (using several unnamed sources) the publisher laid off as many as 100 people at the end of the day Thursday. As of this posting, LucasArts has yet to confirm the layoffs which are said to include VP of Product Development Peter Hirschmann.

LucasArts recently lost a high profile president in Jim Ward (he was replaced by former Electronic Arts Los Angeles exec Darrell Rodriguez). The company just shipped Lego Indiana Jones and their high profile (and console only) game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is due out in September. Other games that are rumored to be on LucasArts's plate include a new collaboration with developer Bioware, a new Star Wars Battlefront game developed by Free Radical Design and the long awaited Indiana Jones games that was demoed at E3 2006. LucasArts also made the decision to leave the Entertainment Software Association last month although it'sstill scheduled to attend E3 next month.