Star Wars: Battlefront is in good hands with EA

 

 

To this day, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is still one of my favorite games based in that galaxy far, far away. Just the idea of jumping into the Midst of the battle of Hoth or swinging a light-saber at my enemies in the lava-laden depths of Mustafar was the sort of thrilling experience I knew, being the huge fan that I am, that I could seriously keep coming back to over and over again. So when Lucasarts in its original form was swallowed by Disney, taking Battlefront III (as well as a number of other promising Star Wars games), to the graveyard with it, I was obviously a tad crushed. what little I had seen on the game had certainly been promising, and it was desperately about time that the experience was brought into the current generation of consoles.

 

 

But last year, a huge glimmer of hope in a new iteration in the series came when Disney gave the rights to make new star wars titles to Electronic Arts. This seemed like a reasonably good fit, considering that they already had Bioware, developer of the also fantastic Old Republic games, sitting right under their belt. But come E3 2013, EA’s big Star Wars announcement very much ended up being developed by Dice, and was certainly the game a lot of us were looking for. one brief teaser and a whole year’s worth of time, Star Wars Battlefront has returned to EA’s E3 conference once again, and after seeing how the development of the game has been going, I’m more excited, both as a star wars fan and as a gamer, then ever before.

 

For starters, for a game like Star Wars: Battlefront, Dice (the developer of the Battlefield series and Mirrors Edge), is a perfect studio for EA to hand it off to. Battlefront is a game series that lives and dies on it’s epic battles, and putting it in their lap practically ensures that they will be brought to life on enormous scale. Imagine dozens of rebel soldiers, smugglers, and jedi duking it out in the midst of destructible environments and crashing X-Wings, and you get the sort of idea of what I mean here. 

 

There is also a clear indication, based on the behind-the-scenes footage shown at EA’s conference today, that a lot of the staff at Dice are major Star Wars nerds. In the time spent between this years E3 and last years, the team has been working hard to make sure everything is perfect and to the letter by way of visiting the exact locations that the movies were shot and that everything that runs through that scenery looks and sounds the way star wars should. It is clearly a labor of love to the team in every sense of the word. 

 

If there something about Battlefront that did disappoint me today, it’s that I didn’t see nearly enough of it. there were nice shots of landscapes and A-Wing fighters flying across Hoth, but there was no actual game play. I understand that Dice wants to do this as carefully and as lovingly as they possibly can, but I’m practically salivating at the thought of finally seeing some next-gen space battles in action.