Something to look forward to: The cult time-travelling first-person shooter TimeSplitters is coming back. Deep Silver shared the news that’s bringing back and reforming the original developer team to work on a new TimeSplitters game, 16 years after the launch of the last entry in the franchise. Development is starting in the coming months.
To develop the new TimeSplitters game, Deep Silver has appointed Steve Ellis and David Doak, programmers and designers of the original TimeSplitters and co-directors of TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, as the head of Free Radical Design.
“To finally be able to confirm that the studio has been formed and that we have a plan for the next TimeSplitters game is incredible,” said Steve Ellis, studio development director at Free Radical Design. “While we cannot tell you anything more at the moment, we look forward to sharing information in the future.”
Since the first TimeSplitters game in 2000, Free Radical Design developed two more titles to the series: TimeSplitters 2 in 2002 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect in 2005. All games were well received by the public and the press, each receiving an average score of over 80% in review aggregators.
A new Deep Silver Studio is coming – Free Radical Design pic.twitter.com/N5qTTcZfsW
— Official Deep Silver (@deepsilver) May 20, 2021
Rumors about a new TimeSplitters game have come and gone for some time, but none came to fruition. In 2007, TimeSplitters 4 was reportedly in development for PS3, but it was apparently cancelled a few years later.
Easter eggs of TimeSplitters were also present in SpellForce 3 and Homefront: The Revolution. Moreover, in the latter, there’s a 4K remaster hidden within the game, locked behind a lost code. As for SpellForce 3, the easter egg was an item named “TimeSplitters 2 Remake,” but the developer came out to state that it was “just an innocent Easter egg.”
A team consisting of a group of fans is also developing a remaster of the original trilogy called TimeSplitters Rewind. The team asked Crytek for permission to make the remastered trilogy when the publisher was the rights’ holder. For now, the team’s objective is to develop an HD collection of the first three games, but their “ultimate goal” is to deliver a TimeSplitters 4.