Electronic Arts and DICE promised gamers a true Star Wars experience with the 2015 outing of Star Wars: Battlefront. Gamers definitely received as much as far as audio and visual thematics were concerned, but there was a lot left to be desired on the gameplay and options front. Well, they're going to be addressing that issue with the sequel.
In the quarterly earnings call for EA's Q4 2017 financials, they laid out what they have planned for Star Wars: Battlefront II. Screenrant gleaned the good parts, where they reported that EA addressed some concerns during the Q&A about how much content would be in Star Wars: Battlefront II.
EA's reply? That the game would be "three times the size of original game at launch."
Whew, well that's a relief... or is it?
Let's do some basic math here: The original Star Wars: Battlefront in 2015 launched with 12 multiplayer maps. So when they say "three times the size" are they saying three times as many maps? Usually, when they refer to the size of a game they're talking about the cumulative amount of content. So I doubt they'll have 36 maps in total, but it is possible they could have 36 variations for the total map count.
Keep in mind that Pandemic's Star Wars: Battlefront II featured all of the multiplayer maps in the co-op campaign story mode but they were slightly rearranged and altered to suit the story objectives. So technically you could say they had twice as many map variations compared to the first game.
Additionally, DICE's Star Wars: Battlefront launched with 10 gameplay modes for the multiplayer, two offline modes, and a handful of mission modes. They later added four additional modes and 16 new maps by the time the DLC wrapped up. So you technically gained more content from the Season Pass than you did from when you originally bought the game for $60 at launch.
So if EA is counting game modes and maps, and we already know that the offline and single-player content has been expanded -- including the all new story mode starring Imperial elite trooper Iden Versio -- then this could also fit within their use of the phrase for Battlefront II being three times the size of the original at launch. They've also brought back the Clone Wars era content, and the heroes from that era.
So technically it's not really hard to be three times as large as DICE's original 2015 outing. Even though 12 maps and 10 game modes sound like a lot, the reality is that a lot of the maps were pretty tiny, and there wasn't much of any kind of interactivity, and the game modes seemed more like they had just come out of white box testing instead of being fully fleshed out additions to the game. That's not to mention that the first Star Wars: Battlefront launched without space battles, a Galactic Conquest mode, and plenty of other maps, features, modes, and options that were present in Pandemic's Star Wars: Battlefront II from more than a decade ago.
As the sequel draws closer to release to match the big roll out of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we'll see if the additional content DICE has packed into the game will be well worth the hype.
