Update: Turns out, it won’t have any features at all! Free Radical has been closed once again and TimeSplitters 4 is not happening. The only solace TimeSplittes fans can find is that the game may have been riddled with predatory features anyway. Not a great coping mechanism, but us TimeSplitters fans are pretty used to coping at this point.
The TimeSplitters games are uniquely content-heavy. Whereas most shooters—both then and now—feature a single-player campaign and multiplayer component, all three TimeSplitters games have a campaign, challenge mode, multiplayer (featuring an abnormally large number of modes), and a map maker. Each game has also included split-screen co-op for all modes, bots, and a diverse range of maps, weapons, and playable characters stretching across several time periods and pop culture genres.
Even as a teenager, the amount of content within each game impressed me. Looking back, I am amazed by how much Free Radical accomplished with each game. Sure, the quality of the first TimeSplitters may have been rough. But with the two sequels, Free Radical proved they could deliver even more content at an even higher standard.
Now, after over a decade’s hiatus, Free Radical is back from the dead and working on a new game, a long-overdue reboot for my favourite game franchise. TimeSplitters is coming back!
When I heard in 2021 that TimeSplitters was being revived, I was elated. But I was also afraid. Having witnessed the worsening of industry practices over the past 15 or so years, I feared the modern gaming industry would not allow a true sequel or reboot of this classic PS2 franchise to exist. Having seen AAA games get ‘streamlined’ to appeal to casual mainstream audiences, content-gutted so the budget can go towards high-fidelity graphics and ever-ballooning marketing campaigns instead, and designed primarily to sell micro-content, I dreaded what such an industry might do to TimeSplitters if they thought they could get away with it.
I feared the potential for microtransactions, the uncritical ‘modernisation’ of every feature. But most of all, I feared the content-gutting of a series that has always been about party-bag content variety.
The prime example that popped into my head of a game series ruined by the modern industry practice of content gutting was Star Wars: Battlefront.
Like TimeSplitters, the original Battlefront had a lot of content, and the sequel had even more. Battlefront 2 had a single-player campaign, galactic conquest, space battles, multiplayer, soldier classes, heroes, bots, and split screen. The series went into hiatus after the 3rd game (brought to near completion by Free Radical, as it happens) was suddenly and inexplicably cancelled. It came back a decade later, in 2015.
I never played it, so I can’t speak to the game’s quality. All I can say is that I was overjoyed to hear Battlefront was coming back.
Published by EA and developed by DICE, the Battlefront reboot was being developed by a much larger team with a much larger budget on much better technology for a much larger market. It seemed like the dream scenario: the money, the technology, and the team were all there. They seemed to have every advantage over the original devs.
And then they revealed what they were working on. The reboot would include no prequel era, no galactic conquest, no space battles, no bots, no classes, fewer maps, weapons, fewer everything. There was no split screen either, though at least that was understandable given the rise of online gaming.
How could a modern development team have more money, more personnel, better technology, a larger market to sell to, and two games to use as guides yet fail to compete with a dev team from 2004?
The game DICE released was graphically stunning, to be sure; that part they pulled off with flying colours. But in terms of what players will stick around for—content and gameplay—the Battlefront reboot was stripped to the bone. Features were missing, content cut, and scope limited.
It makes one wonder where all the money went. Does it really cost tens of millions of dollars to make a game look pretty? If so, was it really worth it? Considering the sad state of the Battlefront franchise currently, I say not.
I am not here to talk about why studios tend to grow less efficient the bigger they get. I just want to point out that despite the vastly enlarged budgets, talent pool, and market size modern games enjoy, the content that games offer is, while undeniably graphically superior, often shallower than what we had ten years earlier.
That’s why I fear for the future of TimeSplitters. More than any other shooter series, TimeSplitters combined quality with quantity. Every Timesplitters fan can remember fondly the challenges, missions, multiplayer modes, weapons, characters, and the hours they spent making maps and listening to the music.
It is unthinkable that any mainline TimeSplitters game would not offer such things–or at least it was unthinkable. Considering the direction AAA games are going, it is a legitimate question whether the upcoming TimeSplitters reboot will even have a single-player campaign or virus mode, never mind a challenge mode or map maker.
Budgets may be bloated nowadays, but that bloat is not resulting in more content. Graphics, environmental detail, animations, and other aspects of production value are reaching near-photorealistic standards of fidelity, but what gamers such as myself care about–gameplay content–is too often sacrificed to achieve these superficial effects.
One thing can be said with relative certainty, though: the reboot will probably feature an online store. I don’t remember the PS2 games having that!