Star Wars Battlefront 2 has been given the release window of Holiday 2017, with EA boss Andrew Wilson revealing in a financial call this week that developer DICE is firmly shifting focus away from the original game, with no more Skirmish content planned as it prepares the sequel for launch later in the year.
Although DICE’s first stab at the Battlefront series certainly had its admirers, it failed to live up to expectations as a result of its lack of content and balancing issues. This time around EA has brought more developers into the fold in order to help DICE create a bigger, bigger sequel, and while we’ve yet to receive our first glimpse of the game, we now know more about what we should expect. Take a look below:
Story
Unlike the first game, Star Wars Battlefront 2 will feature a single-player campaign with a story, bringing to life a heavily requested feature that will add context to its battles. The first Battlefront belatedly added a single-player mode, but this time around we should be seeing cutscenes and the like make an appearance.
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There’s no word yet on whether or not it will feature a brand new story set within the Star Wars universe, or if it will instead follow the plot of the film series, though we’d imagine it’ll be the former option.
Multiple eras
EA also confirmed that Battlefront 2 will feature “multiple Star Wars eras,” which suggests that the prequels will be involved. Its predecessor largely focused upon the original trilogy though also included locations and characters from The Force Awakens and Rogue One in later DLC, but completely ignored the existence of Episode‘s I, II and III. These movies have also been completely ignored in Disney’s post-Lucas take on the franchise, so it will be interesting to see how they’ll be tackled in Battlefront 2 — even though they weren’t exactly good films, they did provide a lot of interesting locations that translated well into the original Battlefront games. Hopefully that will be the case in EA’s Battlefront 2.
“New ways to play”
Alongside the announcement of the single-player story mode, Andrew Wilson also stated that there will be “new ways to play” in Battlefront 2. This could mean the inevitable addition of new game modes, but it’s also likely that virtual reality will make a reappearance in the game after the Rogue One VR mission mission in its predecessor. If so, Wilson’s comment would suggest that there will be a more robust VR offering this time around.
Three developers
A big change for the sequel will be the addition of two new developers, with DICE now being joined by Burnout creators Criterion and the newly established Motive Studios. Though each team’s exact role hasn’t been confirmed, it’s likely that DICE will be managing the multiplayer aspect of the game while Criterion takes over the single-player, potentially leaving Motive to handle its VR features.
