Star Wars: Battlefront from EA and DICE is already well recognized for housing the heroes from the Galactic Empire era as playable characters on the ground, but DICE is now wooing players with the playable heroic vehicles that will be available to use as well.
In the rarely seen but much talked about Fighter Squadron Mode, players will be able to play as Boba Fett's Slave I, as revealed on the Star Wars Battlefront website.
The game's senior designer, Björn Sundell, commented about the Slave I being flyable in the upcoming shooter game for home consoles and PC, saying...
One crucial thing to nail when designing the Hero Vehicles is to make players feel truly cool, powerful, and heroic when piloting them. This goes for both the visuals and feel. Playing Star Wars Battlefront, you should get the same feeling that you get when you see the Millennium Falcon swooping by and taking out TIE fighters in the movies.
They mention in the post that the hero vehicles will be harder to take down the normal Imperial or Rebel star fighters. They suggest that if the Millennium Falcon or Slave I begin hounding you down during a match that you should weave into the lower areas of the map to lose them in tight crevices and dangerous rock formations.
One thing that seemed to be completely missing from the beta was the ability to barrel roll or perform evasive maneuvers. I do wonder if they will add this feature in the final version. In the old Battlefront 2 you could tilt left or right and perform advanced evasive tactics to avoid incoming fire, whether it was headed toward you or coming from behind. I wasn't able to figure out if the new Star Wars: Battlefront has any evasive moves in the air during the beta but it didn't appear to.
If you're being hounded down by the Slave I or the Millennium Falcon it would seem kind of silly not to have dodging tactics because otherwise you'll just have to settle for getting blasted out of the sky.
They do reveal that Boba Fett's Slave I will have the ability to initiate a mini-map radar jammer to prevent other players from picking him up on radar. The ship also comes with ion cannons and a proton torpedo launcher.
The hero vessels can be acquired the same way everything else in DICE's Battlefront is acquired: power-ups.
Players will fly around in the map until they come across a hero power-up, where they'll have the opportunity to briefly fly around in the Millennium Falcon or Slave I just until the hero timer runs out or the opposing team shoots them down.
Not everyone is excited about the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront given how it doesn't quite shape up with what Free Radical was doing with Star Wars: Battlefront 3 and what LucasArts was previously doing with Star Wars: First Assault, which was a little like a precursor to Battlefront 3.
Nevertheless, you can look for the Fighter Squadron Mode and the hero ships to go live with the rest of the modes in EA and DICE's vision of Battlefront starting November 19th for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
