A few years ago, in a studio not so far away (or kinda far away, depending on where you live), Free Radical Design had a good thing going for it: the Star Wars Battlefront series. The games were praised by gamers and critics, but then the third entry was cancelled out of the blue. Free Radical Design was nothing if not ambitious, because it started planning Star Wars Battlefront 4 even before the third game was released. Some of those plans recently surfaced on Imgur, so let’s go through some of their more interesting concepts.
The basis of the game would have been “what if the prequel films had gone very differently.” I’m not talking about if Jar Jar Binks had never been in the movies different; I’m talking about a whole mirror universe where all the roles are reversed. In the fourth game, Anakin would have killed Padme Amidala on purpose and would have still become a Sith. He would eventually have become the Vader we all know and love/fear (hopefully still voiced by James Earl Jones), but he would have been Emperor Vader, lord and master of the entire Galactic Empire. And yes, that probably means he would have killed Palpatine as well.
As for Obi-Wan Kenobi, he would have joined the Sith alongside Anakin. Judging by the art, he easily could have served the role Darth Vader served in the movies: as the big bad general who commands the Imperial forces both from afar and from the front line.
Now, you might wonder what would have happened to Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa (technically she probably would have been Leia Skywalker in the game). If Obi-Wan had gone over to the dark side, who would have hidden them from the watchful eyes of the now-emperor Vader? Well, nobody. True to Vader’s word, Luke would have ruled the galaxy in the game alongside his father as a Sith Lord.
As for Leia, the designers had contingencies for different story ideas. Some called for her to be a Jedi fighting the good fight against her tyrannical family, others had her acting as a Sith Lord alongside her brother.
And main characters weren’t the only ones given a mirror universe makeover. Villains such as Count Dooku, Asajj Ventress, and Darth Maul would have been Jedi, Mace Windu a Sith (with the galaxy’s most badass purple lightsaber), Grievous a non-cybernetic rebel fighter, and Chewbacca almost unrecognizable as a broken (and possibly feral) slave.
As for Yoda? Not much in the way of concept art, but the Imgur album states he’d be dead. Instead of dying from old age, he would have been killed by Anakin.
If the album is any indication, the story would have ended with Anakin redeeming himself and becoming a Jedi once again (without dying), and Obi-Wan would have ended up a Sith hermit, completely overtaken by the dark side.
I highly suggest visiting the original Imgur album; there’s far more concept art than we could ever fit in this article, and it is well worth your time, if only to discover what might have been had Free Radical Design been allowed to continue creating Star Wars Battlefront games.
