Ubi to publish new Free Radical game

The developers of Free Radical Design made a name for themselves by creating a new franchise from scratch in the early days of the PlayStation 2 with TimeSplitters. The game spawned a pair of sequels and met with success throughout the current hardware generation. With a new generation underway, Free Radical is looking to similarly start anew.

Publisher Ubisoft this morning announced that it had reached an agreement with Free Radical Design to publish the studio's next effort, an action game based on an original intellectual property, sometime between April 2006 and March 2007.

The game will appear on PCs and next-generation consoles, and aims to appeal to older gamers by placing players in moral dilemmas and forcing them to make difficult choices to immerse them in the game experience.

"With this game, we plan to take players to a new level of intensity and create an environment at once terrifying, enthralling, and impossible to resist," said Jay Cohen, vice president of publishing at Ubisoft.

This isn't the first time Free Radical has worked with a large publisher to bring its games to market. The first two installments of TimeSplitters were published by Eidos Interactive. The most recent one, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, was put out by Electronic Arts.