Despite a lot of grumbling from within the community about Star Wars: Battlefront from Electronic Arts and DICE, the reality is that the game sold quite well. In fact, it sold well enough for a sequel to be greenlit and EA and DICE already have a time frame on when you can expect Star Wars: Battlefront 2 to arrive.
According to Polygon, the game will be available a year from now, launching during the fall season of 2017. The news came during an investor call where EA's chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, revealed that they have plans on getting the game up and out by next year around this time, which fits in line with previous comments made earlier in the year that they had plenty of sequels planned for the game.
Typical marketing spiel outlined their goals for the sequel to Star Wars: Battlefront, with Jorgensen saying that they're working hard to make a "deep" and "engaging" offering. Of course, that little nugget of information doesn't really say much of anything about what the actual game will be like.
The original release of Star Wars: Battlefront resulted in a lot of mixed feelings about the game from consumers and long-time fans of the series that was originally developed by Pandemic. The games that released more than a decade ago for the PS2, PC, and the OG Xbox actually contained a lot more content than what originally released for the Xbox One, PC and PS4, creating a rift in how the gaming community viewed the Frostbite 3-powered shooter.
Some of the biggest complaints came from how limited the gameplay was. The removal of the dodge and roll, the removal of vehicle hijacking, the removal of manual vehicle acquirement, and the removal of ground-to-air takeoffs drastically altered a lot of the tactics and gameplay in Battlefront. However, EA was gunning for a more casual audience -- people who saw Star Wars: Episode VII and wanted to be able to pick up and play a game that captured the aesthetics of the Star Wars universe. EA revealed that their core audience was actually casuals, and that's why the newer game was dumbed down compared to Pandemic's offerings a decade ago.
A lot of gamers were left wondering why EA didn't just brush up and finish off Free Radical's depiction of Star Wars: Battlefront 3, which was closer to a direct sequel to Pandemic's Star Wars: Battlefront 2, filling in the story segments between the Clone Wars and the rise of the Galactic Empire.
In Battlefront 2 the campaign story followed the 501st, known as "Vader's Fist". It explained the transition from the clones to non-clone Stormtroopers, as well as what happened to the clone facility on Kamino.
Free Radical's Battlefront 3 -- based on the leaked alpha footage -- followed two brothers during the end of the Clone Wars, leading up to Order 66, and presumably just beyond. The leaked footage received a lot of praise because it followed closely in the footsteps of Pandemic's games, and improved upon them by adding space to ground transitions in a single map, as well as massively scaled battles between the two sides.
DICE took a decidedly different direction, focusing on slightly smaller battles on more intimate maps, along with changing the way vehicles and weapons handle. The real question for DICE's Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is whether or not they're going to include all of the content and DLC from the first game in the second game or if they'll make people pay extra for it? I'm also curious if they will make any changes to the way vehicles can be acquired, or if they'll keep them as power-ups?
We'll likely find out more about the game leading up to E3 next year.
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