The original beta for cancelled multiplayer Star Wars shooter First Assault popped up again in the wild this week, in the form of YouTube videos that showed the game being played online. Cancelled in 2013, First Assault was just gearing up for announcement, with a playable beta already in place. Then, a few years ago, a team of just two decided to attempt a resurrection. Originally, however, their plans were much bigger: they wanted to remake the game entirely in Unreal Engine 4.
“In late 2023, we found that Xenia Netplay [an emulator for playing Xbox 360 games online, providing they had LAN support] had reached a functional stage where the leaked Battlefront 3 build was able to be played in multiplayer,” custom server manager Shaymin tells me. “However, there was no real commitment to working on First Assault due to a major obstacle: the main menu required the recreation of a profile management server.”
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But first, they’d need to get that server reinstated, which meant overcoming another issue: Xenia had no HTTP functions—even if they got the server working, there’d be no way to connect. They opted to continue trying to remake the game until, in early 2025, some Unreal Engine modders “created a hack to trigger and then directly connect people into a Xenia Netplay session.
“This was a fairly messy process but it sparked interest, and we continued researching First Assault to ensure we had all the information we could gather, but simply lacked the time to invest in recreating the server at the time.”
The rest of 2025 saw the Xenia community making some “massive progress” on creating HTTP functions in the emulator, but the pair couldn’t quite figure out the exact formatting they’d need to pass the game’s server checks, “essentially throwing us into a loop of troubleshooting loads of error screens”.
“When all hope seemed lost,” (you can imagine that bit in Star Wars intro crawl text if you want) “we ended up turning to Claude Code, an incredibly powerful AI platform that is currently being used on a couple of game decomplication projects, including for the classic Battlefront games, to aid in analysing the game code and information we had extracted”
After feeding the AI platform all the decompiled source code, plus information they’d gathered and work they’d done, then letting it run for a few days (“an eternity for AI models,” says Shaymin), they had what they needed to confirm the correct formatting. They could now pass information to and from the custom server, and build and complete the required HTTP functions in Xenia.
“While turning to AI was not the original plan,” says Shaymin, “I doubt we’d have completed this project without losing interest. We had no real networking information or logs to go off for this game, like you would for released multiplayer games where people might run packet captures or monitor traffic. We only had the game scripts, and a messy incomplete decomplication at that, which made it harder to read how the game was parsing information to and from the server.
“Even with AI, it’s been difficult getting the game to where it is. It’s been a long process, especially considering it was just 2 dudes working on it,” Shaymin says, though adds that creating HTTP functions in Xenia “would not have been possible without the existing work done by AdrianCassar and wildmaster84, who had pretty much completed everything we would need to run the game as we are.”
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Which all takes us to this week, where the word got out the team would be running everything from their own public server and Discord, and we all got to see footage of players named things like ‘Grannytoes’ scoring squad kills. There’s definitely a charm to First Assault, with its dense Tatooine map offering action that looks refreshingly grounded in the reality of Star Wars while playing off its fantasy. However, there’s a famously litigious elephant in the room I still had to ask Shaymin about.
“Regarding Disney, I have no concern at all,” Shaymin tells me. “We pose little to no threat to any upcoming or ongoing titles we are aware of, which seems to be their main motivator when taking down projects. We’re past any point when I would expect a continuation of the First Assault game series, and the game build has been publicly circulating for more than 10 years.
“They never stepped in for any of our cancelled Battlefront 3 shenanigans we’ve been pulling for a while now so I don’t believe they will do so now. Ultimately, all we did was reverse engineer the game server and create a new branch of an existing emulator. The only wrongdoing we’re guilty of is distributing the build from [preservation site] Hidden Palace, but our patches are arbitrary and the game would work with the custom server regardless of source.”
As for the original LucasArts team behind the game, Shaymin says “a lot of them” are “supportive of our project, excited that people can now experience even the limited slice of what the game was going to be”, which all scans with what designer Patrick Wren has said in the past. I’ve reached out to Wren for comment, although he hasn’t yet replied. Perhaps 13 years is enough for the playtesting fatigue to have worn off, and he’s too busy playing First Assault.
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