Star Wars Battlefront: EA Dice answers fan fears

Battlefield is one of the most respected military shooters of the decade, and Star Wars is a reasonably well-known science fiction film. So when the developer of the former set out to make a game based on the latter it was always going to be controversial.

Ever since its official unveiling at the Star Wars Experience event in April, gamers and movie fans have worried about Star Wars Battlefront, the multiplayer shooter based on the original trilogy. EA Dice has largely weathered that storm, producing a convincing E3 demo, based around the Hoth and Tatooine levels, but we put several lingering doubts to the studio’s general manager Patrick Bach. Here’s what he had to say.

Battlefront has none of Battlefield’s deeper features such as squads, classes and highly customisable load-outs.

“We have a strong legacy with Battlefield, but we did not want this to be a battlefield game – we wanted it to have a heart and soul of its own. We came at it from a very different angle. We know that the core audience of a game like this is different to the Battlefield audience. There’s a crossover, but Star Wars fans expect a Star Wars game, not a Battlefield game. We looked at what Star Wars stands for, rather than asking how can we tweak Battlefield to be something else.

“And, actually, we’ve received criticism both for not being enough like Battlefield and for being too much like Battlefield. We’ve had to accept the fact that people will be upset with us until they get to play it. And when people did play it at E3 almost all the negativity went away. We stayed true to what we believed in, and when people saw it, they got it, they agreed that this is a game on its own, it is not Battlefield, and they liked it.”

If the single-player component is just a series of co-op and multiplayer maps filled with AI opponents, isn’t it going to lack depth and longevity?

I don’t want to say, you just have to trust us, we need to prove it of course, but we’re using all the knowledge about depth and longevity that we’ve accumulated over years of making the Battlefield games. Also the missions we have in the game have more longevity than most single-player campaigns. They tend to have a length of between 6-10 hours and that’s it – most people don’t replay them, most don’t go through the secondary objectives, they run through the story and they’re done.

In Battlefront, it’s very different, it has more to do with replayability than most narrative-driven single-player experiences. It gives you something else, something you may not be used to seeing. We have done a lot with this game that keeps it attractive for a longer period of time. There’s a lot of persistence work going into it – how you unlock things, how you explore new ways of playing, how you collect things and rank up, and also how you compare yourself with your friends. There are a lot of different ways to play the game. There’s a lot of variation.

Why the focus on the original Star Wars trilogy only?

The game is being developed and refined in collaboration with Lucasfilm, both parties agreed quite early that we wanted to create something that’s true to the Star Wars universe rather than just mixing and matching everything. So staying with episodes four, five and six felt like a reasonable approach – they’re in the same time era, so you can mix characters, vehicles and maps in almost any way without completely breaking the logic of the universe, whereas if you added the prequel era... well, you could argue it would be fun, but it wouldn’t be authentic. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but we had to stick with one, so we went deep into the classic battles of the four, five and six era.

Also, there’s a movie coming out, which is episode seven, so it felt more natural to show you the things that happened just before that, rather than going back even further or mixing and matching, which wouldn’t make sense with the film.

The AT-ATs aren’t pilotable and there are no space battles. Is the game going to be able to capture the epic feel of Star Wars battles?

Living up to the Star Wars IP is a huge challenge – there’s an argument that you can only fail – because it’s Star Wars, right? Everyone has a keen eye on what you’re doing and they spot every mis-step. We’ve never really built [on] someone else’s IP before - and this is one of the biggest IPs in the industry. The biggest challenge has been staying true to what makes Star Wars Star Wars. The problem other Star Wars games have had is that they’ve tried to copy the output of Star Wars rather than understanding the core of what makes the movies. The Battlefront development team has tried to find the soul of Star Wars. There’s more behind it than just copying.

Are there ideas that the team has kept on hold for future titles or DLC? Will dedicated space battles simply turn up later?

There’s a lot of stuff we didn’t have time for, but we’ve picked the coolest moments, the ones that made most sense for multiple people playing together. One design philosophy we always have is that we want different people to play together – we want flying vehicles with ground-based troops, we want to mix and match different types of gameplay on the same map – that’s what makes a multiplayer game fun. One thing that gives a game a long tail is the ability to change your play style within the same game.