Star Wars Battlefront 2 will have 'multiple eras' - but should it go back to the prequels?
If you liked the idea of Star Wars Battlefront but felt - beyond all the screen-authentic locations and vehicles - there wasn't enough there, just wait for the next game. EA CEO Andrew Wilson teased some new details about the Star Wars Battlefront sequel coming later this year, and the short version is "more everything".
Learn what the Future has in store for #StarWarsBattlefront in 2017 and beyond: https://t.co/4m8yeuxJTe pic.twitter.com/cxhm0MVpQHJanuary 31, 2017
There are two major points to zoom in on here:
"An all-new single-player campaign"
The old Star Wars Battlefront games had a lot to do even if you didn't play online, which made DICE's version feel extra limited in that respect. Eventually single-player and co-op Skirmishes were introduced to round out the relatively small-scale Missions, but it was too little and too late for many players. Hopefully the meta-strategic (and infinitely replayable) Galactic Conquest mode from the original games is on the table for DICE's next Battlefront, too.
"Play [...] across multiple Star Wars eras"
Battlefront 2015 kept its blasters trained squarely on the original trilogy of Star Wars, with DLC to bring in Rogue One's Scarif and Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Jakku expanding the timeline just a teensy bit. The next Battlefront will have no such restriction. Some maps from The Force Awakens are a good bet, as is another tie-in for Star Wars: The Last Jedi (which will likely hit theaters within a few weeks of Battlefront 2017's release date), and you can't have a Star Wars game without a Hoth map so I'm sure the original trilogy will be represented too.
Now we arrive at the bantha in the room. Should DICE reach all the way back to the prequel trilogy when it's looking for source material? I mean, it worked out okay for the original Battlefront games. But a decade later, is the world ready for an immaculately rendered video game adaptation of frog people catapulting giant marbles at robot soldiers?
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I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.