TimeSplitters project reportedly began life as battle royale, pivoted to an expanded TS2 remake

The new TimeSplitters project recently in development at Free Radical Design was originally pitched as a battle royale game to rival Fortnite, a developer on the project has claimed.

This year, however, the project then took a “massive 180” to become something else – something the studio reportedly much preferred: an expanded remake of TimeSplitters 2 with extra content and a few plot changes.

“Originally it was a Fortnite clone. Nobody wanted that really, not even us, but we didn’t have much of a choice for a long time,” the developer told fan wiki The Free Radical Archive.

After the project’s U-turn, it was then planned to be “mostly TS2” with a couple of TimeSplitters: Future Perfect levels, an original level and a couple of brand new sections. “Or something along those lines,” the developer continued. “That was the pitch we made to the publishers. It still might’ve changed down the line.”

The game’s release was estimated to still be two years’ away.

“It was going to be a ‘What If…’ where Corporal Hart went through instead of Cortez so we could make things slightly different,” the developer continued, referencing the two main characters of TimeSplitters 2.

In the original TS2, it’s Cortez who does all the adventuring and gets to be the solo star of TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. In this version, it would have been Hart – and it’s interesting to see this focus on the character reflected in the huge dump of character models and art assets you can now find online, in which Hart pops up.

As for the project’s status now that Free Radical Design has closed its doors, the developer was clear: “as of this moment it’s cancelled. Whether [publisher] Plaion will try to have another studio in the future to give it a crack, I don’t know.”

Free Radical Design was revived in 2021 specifically to work on TimeSplitters and bring the beloved British shooter franchise back from the dead. But the studio was shut down earlier this month, as a part of umbrella corporation Embracer’s catastrophic financial cuts.