If you're a Star Wars fan, you already know about the upcoming film and the new game from EA and DICE, but one thing you may not know is that Star Wars: Battlefront actually has narrative ties to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
According to Coming Soon, Star Wars: Battlefront will be a lead-in to the Force Awakens, giving gamers and movie-goers something to chew on as far as Star Wars lore and continuity goes. The game will feature the Battle of Jakku in a DLC pack, which will be available as a pre-order bonus on December 1st. According to EA, the DLC will explain how the giant Star Destroyer ended up buried in the sand of Jakku.
Don't worry, though, the Battle of Jakku DLC will be available to everyone, for free, starting December 8th, 2015.
According to Coming Soon, this is the official description for the pre-order DLC:
[...] the pivotal moment when the New Republic confronted key Imperial holdouts on a remote desert planet on the Outer Rim. Taking place in the aftermath of the Rebel victory in the Battle of Endor, players will experience the events that created the massive, battle-scarred landscape of Jakku.
The “battle scarred landscape” they're referring to shows up briefly in the latest Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. We see a Star Destroyer that has crash landed, buried halfway into the sand. You can scope it out in the image below.
Based on the image, it looks like the fight took place quite some time ago. A derelict X-Wing that's been destroyed in the foreground may indicate some sort of conflict that unfolded in space or the upper atmosphere of the planet.
Even though EA and DICE released a new two-minute teaser trailer for Star Wars: Battlefront, there are still a ton of questions left unanswered. We do know that the game won't have a single-player campaign, but it will have single-player offline play modes. We also know that some classic characters and villains will make appearances at some point, as confirmed by the recently released trailer.
However, we don't know if the game will sport the ground-to-space (or vice versa) features that Free Radical spent a lot of time trying to perfect in their rendition of Star Wars: Battlefront 3. The idea that a Star Destroyer has been brought to its proverbial knees (or rather, buried in the sand) could mean that aerial combat and ground combat will merge into one gigantic battle. A lot of that will boil down to the technical possibilities afforded to the eighth-gen consoles. While the Xbox One and PS4 are a lot more powerful than the Xbox 360 and PS3, if DICE is targeting the visual fidelity showcased in the trailer – which was running in-engine assets, by the way – they may have to scale back on how big the arenas are. However, if they're going for something truly massive in size, then it may not be impossible to see just how that Star Destroyer got blasted down out of the sky and into the ground.
The game is scheduled to release on November 17th, 2015 for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC. You can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the official website.
