PLAY LIFE, LIVE GAMES: EA cut Ahsoka Tano, Mustafar and other content from 'Battlefront 2'

It's pretty safe to say that "Star Wars Battlefront 3" is a cursed project at this point.

The Battlefront series started back in 2004 on the PC, PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox. A sequel followed a year later and is considered by me and many others as one of the best Star Wars games ever made.

In 2006, Free Radical Design, the studio behind the TimeSplitters series, was hired by LucasArts to make a third game in the Battlefront series for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

However, the game was canceled in 2008. Free Radical developers said the game was practically done and that LucasArts could not commit to spending a lot of money on the game's marketing.

An unnamed LucasArts employee told GameSpot that Free Radical was constantly missing deadlines on the project.

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Other than some hand-held games for the PlayStation Portable, the Battlefront series sat dormant until Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 and Electronic Arts signed a 10-year deal the following year to exclusively develop Star Wars games for PC and home consoles.

EA released a reboot of "Star Wars Battlefront" In 2015 developed by its studio DICE, which became the best selling Star Wars game of all time. "Star Wars Battlefront 2" came out in 2017 and is the third best selling game in the franchise.

With sales like that, you would assume a third game in the rebooted series would be a given, but last week it was revealed by EA insider Tom Henderson that the company had rejected a pitch from the developers at DICE to make a third Battlefront. The reason Henderson was given was that because of licensing fees with Disney, the game would have to sell 20% more copies to make the same amount of money as a non-Star Wars title.

That wasn't the only Battlefront news we got last week.

Dennis Brannvall, the game director of "Star Wars Battlefront 2," went to the Battlefront sub-Reddit page to discuss some of the ideas the team at DICE were working on for the two games that never made it out.

DICE's original Battlefront game had four major post-launch content releases that saw new characters and maps added to the game, but the characters and maps we almost got were very different. The bounty hunter IG-88, Grand Moff Tarkin from the original "Star Wars" film and an old Obi-Wan Kenobi and a map based on Mos Eisley from the original film were all planned for the game.

Tarkin and IG-88 never came to either of DICE's Battlefront games, but the Mos Eisley map was moved to the sequel, and that game also eventually received a young version of the Obi-Wan character.

Brannvall also revealed that his team was working on bringing the fan-favorite characters of Ahsoka Tano and Asajj Ventress, as well as the lava-filled planet of Mustafar, to "Star Wars Battlefront 2" last year when EA canceled future content for the gameand moved its developers over to the recently released "Battlefield 2042."

With EA losing the exclusive license for Star Wars games, I'm really hoping another developer will step up and give us the "Star Wars Battlefront 3" we fans have always wanted and never received.

Dusty Ricketts can be reached at dricketts@nwfdailynews.com. He is currently playing "Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic." You can find him through his PlayStation Network ID: DustRAG316.

This article originally appeared on Northwest Florida Daily News: Electronic Arts cut Ahsoka, Mustafar, other content from 'Battlefront 2'