After more than a decade and a half in stasis, TimeSplitters is officially returning and this new game is being developed by a reformed Free Radical Design, the developer of the original series.
Publisher Deep Silver announced the news on Twitter, confirming that the reborn studio would be lead by Steve Ellis and David Doak — both are TimeSplitters veterans. Seeing as fans have been calling for a new entry in the series for years now, perhaps unsurprisingly the news has gone down fairly well with gamers.
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The original TimeSplitters was a PS2 launch title back in 2000; a sequel followed in 2002, and then a third entry, called TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, launched in 2005. Since then the series has languished in various states of development until the original Free Radical Design studio (which had subsequently been renamed Crytek UK) was shut down in 2014.
In 2018, THQ Nordic (Deep Silver’s parent company) bought the rights to the franchise, and in 2019 Steve Ellis was hired to “help plot the course” of the much-loved series. That got long time fans very excited about the prospect of the game being revived, which this news now confirms is happening.
A new Deep Silver Studio is coming - Free Radical Design pic.twitter.com/N5qTTcZfsWMay 20, 2021
The announcement doesn’t give too much away. There is no trailer, screenshots, or marketing material to speak of. And we don’t even have confirmation of whether this continuation of the franchise will come in the form of a sequel, a complete reboot, or just a remake of one/all of the original games.
Perhaps the key takeaway from this announcement is that Deep Silver is “setting up a new development studio” and that “development on a new game has not yet started." So, while it’s definitely exciting to know that at some point we’ll be playing a new TimeSplitters game, it’ll likely be a way down the road before we even have anything to look at, let alone actually play.
Of course, fans of the series have spent the last 16 years waiting for the franchise to make some form of return, so they likely won’t mind doing a little more of it. We also don’t yet know what platforms this new TimeSplitters project will launch on. PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC would seem a reasonable bet — unless of course development takes long enough that the PS6 is out by then.
