If you're the kind of gamer waiting for a few more reasons not to pre-order Star Wars: Battlefront, DICE and EA have provided no shortage of opportunities to give you some. Answering a few community questions, it's been confirmed that no split-screen mode will be in the PC version and you can't fly Y-Wings.
What's starting to look like a base game with a potentially lucrative DLC roadmap attached to it, Star Wars: Battlefront will not allow you to fly in the Y-Wings for modes available in the initial launch of the game. This was confirmed today by Mathew Everett, the senior product manager and community liaison for DICE and EA on Star Wars: Battlefront, who took to the Star Wars blogosphere to address some of the questions from the community.
The answers were kept concise and to the point, with Everett simply noting that the Y-Wings are not playable at this time, writing...
Y-wings are non-player controlled vehicles. They are a support vehicle that you can call into battle within certain game modes.
I'm sure there's a follow-up question in there about DLC modes that might contain a flyable Y-Wing. But for the moment that question wasn't posed so Everett didn't answer it.
This does call into question if DICE plans on opening up more vehicles in later content packs for Battlefront? There's a lot already that doesn't appear to be in this initial release of the game – stuff that was in Pandemic's first iteration of Star Wars: Battlefront, which included flyable Y-Wings – that makes me wonder if maybe a lot of this content is being worked on as DLC?
I understand this isn't a re-skinned version of Battlefield and I understand this is on the all new Frostbite 3 game engine, but at the same time we're coming off all the major hype built up by Free Radical for their vision of Star Wars: Battlefront 3 and to be completely honest I'm quite disappointed. Free Radical (who later became Crytek UK) basically took everything that was in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and then ramped it up by 11. Most impressive was the ground-to-space battles, where it all took place in one map.
It's easy to see how gamers could see this new iteration and get enraptured by the graphics and physics, but on the gameplay side we're seeing far fewer options being made available in this newest game compared to what Star Wars: Battlefront 3 was aiming for.
As for the split-screen on PC... I don't think anyone is surprised by this at all. The Unreal Engine has built-in split-screen support for PC, but it's rarely ever utilized for PC games by AAA studios. And with PC gaming turning toward couch gaming for this fall with the Steam Machines, it's more disappointing than it is shocking that PC gamers with powerful enough rigs won't be able to enjoy split-screen. But again, we've come to expect this from most AAA outings.
One thing that is interesting is the new vehicle power-up item that will allow players to hop into a vehicle after acquiring the power-up. It's a neat alternative to trying to rush to a vehicle before the bots/players snatch them all up. I am genuinely curious to see how that plays out when the game launches.
You can learn more about Star Wars: Battlefront by paying a visit to the game's official website.
