Free Radical Design co-founder and TimeSplitters co-creator Steve Ellis has declared that the studio's recent closure is "probably the end" of his involvement with the legendary FPS franchise.
In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Ellis says that the canceled TimeSplitters project's shutdown was "a big letdown" for him, and that he doesn't know what it would take to get him interested in working on the franchise again.
He also goes into a little detail regarding what the studio's new TimeSplitters would have looked like, and it sounds like it would have been a bit of a departure, although Ellis says he was "hopeful that it would have satisfied everyone".
Earlier this month, ex-Free Radical staffer Rob Steptoe, who worked on art design for the company, posted footage that he said represented the TimeSplitters game the studio was working on before it closed.
However, in the GI.biz interview, Ellis says that this game "was not the one we were working on when we got canceled". The footage showed a game that closely resembled Epic Games' smash hit Fortnite, and Ellis says that cloning that game "would be pointless, so that's not what we were doing".
He says the concept on which the team was actually working was "quite different" to that footage, which represents an earlier version of the project.
Still, it sounds like the finished product wouldn't quite have been TimeSplitters as we knew it; Ellis says it's important to please fans, but that "you can't make a profitable game by only selling to those guys".
When it comes to porting or remastering TimeSplitters 2 - something Ellis says he's been asked to do countless times - it's not as easy as you might think, according to the Free Radical co-founder.
He says that studios expect remasters to be "quick and cheap", but that making TimeSplitters' massive range of characters and assets to modern standards would be very expensive.
It's worth pointing out that TimeSplitters 2 has technically already been ported; it appeared in 2016's Homefront: The Revolution, and the port is fully playable, although you will have to buy Homefront: The Revolution to play it.
It's well worth reading GI.biz's full interview with Ellis, as he discusses lots of interesting tidbits about Free Radical, including how the studio's culture at Embracer differed from its early days and what working under the group was like. You can check out the full interview here.
