A first look at DICE’s gorgeous revival of the Star Wars Battlefront series. By Wes Fenlon
It’s day one of Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, California, and I’m standing in the briefing room from Return of the Jedi, where Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar laid out the plans for the Rebel Alliance’s assault on the second Death Star. Barely an hour ago, Star Wars Episode VII director JJ Abrams revealed the second teaser trailer for The Force Awakens. Everyone in the room is starry-eyed, riding high on the rush of seeing Han Solo for the first time in 32 years.
We’re not standing in the real briefing room from Return of the Jedi, of course, but a recreation built to showcase the public’s first real look at EA and DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront. The three-tier risers encircling the room are filled with journalists, not Rebel pilots. And when the presentation begins, it’s disappointingly on a large screen built into the wall, not a hologram projected up from the circular console in the middle of the floor. Someone in the room lets out a squeak of delight just the same, when the forest moon of Endor appears on the screen.
If it weren’t for the telltale shimmer of aliasing as sunlight streams through the canopy, I’d swear the ferns and towering space redwoods of Endor rendered in DICE’s Frostbite engine were the real deal. It looks incredible. Then the action starts: a blaster and minimalist HUD appear on screen and we’re running across Endor in first-person, blasting stormtroopers off speeder bikes and blasting other stormtroopers right in the face. An AT-ST shows up, and another Rebel trooper uses a jetpack to leap into the air and blow up its cockpit with a rocket launcher. It all looks far better than any Star Wars game before it, and DICE swears it’s in-engine, captured from a live session.
We’ve seen Frostbite flex its graphical muscle before, most recently in Battlefield 4 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. But seeing it applied to the Star Wars universe, and such familiar locations as Endor, is something else again. As blaster bolts pepper the screen and speeder bikes jet through the forest, exploding into oversaturated orange fireballs, Battlefront makes me think of the vivid digital effects of the Star Wars prequel films meshed with the used, worn-down aesthetic of the original trilogy.
That latter bit is key, as the DICE team will repeat again and again as they talk about their new Battlefront, due in November 2015. Authenticity is their overriding goal.
“When we started the process of creating the concept for the game, we already knew that we wanted to go really classic original trilogy,” says Sigurlína Ingvarsdottir, senior producer on Battlefront. “These fantastical planets of Endor, Tatooine, and Hoth, that’s where we wanted to go. We wanted to really bring you to that world in a way that no one had before.”
Ingvarsdottir runs the Battlefront development team out of DICE’s office in Stockholm, Sweden, coordinating with the other producers, design director Niklas Fegraeus, EA, and Lucasfilm.
Like most of her team, Ingvarsdottir is a diehard Star Wars fan. “You know, I cannot remember not knowing what Star Wars was,” she says. “One of my first memories as a kid is being really really scared of a dark, ominous being in a movie. I can’t place it in time, but it’s when I first saw Darth Vader.”
Ingvarsdottir has years of history in the games industry as a producer at EVE Online developer CCP, but she never worked on Battlefield. To make Star Wars Battlefront, DICE built a new team, combining Battlefield veterans with newcomers. It’s hard to tell, so far, exactly how much Battlefront will feel like Battlefield with a very pretty coat of Star Wars paint (and some original trilogy weathering) – even though it’s been two years, EA is still keeping most of the game’s details tightly under wraps.
Stepping out
The Endor demo is of a new mode called Walker Assault, which will support up to 40 players online – Battlefront’s maximum player count. As players zip by on speeder bikes, a trio of Rebel troopers advance down a creek towards stormtroopers, their bodies ensphered in effervescent blue energy shields. Then a towering AT-AT comes lumbering through the forest. Rebel troops scramble to avoid its blaster fire, while the trooper our demo is following walks between its legs, narrowly avoiding one foot as it crashes to the ground.
He dashes up a hill towards a satellite uplink and interacts with it while a bar quickly fills up – the interaction seems comparable to capturing a control point in Battlefield – and after a few seconds, the uplink calls in a flight of Y-Wings to take out the looming AT-AT. We hear the Y-Wing pilots over the radio as they make a quick flyover, barely visible through Endor’s thick canopy. Then they’re back, raining down pulsating pink proton bombs onto the AT-AT. One erupts on the cockpit, and the walker elicits a metallic death groan before topping forward onto its front knees and collapsing to the ground.
It’s a hell of a spectacle, the kind of Star Wars battle scene any fan would’ve dreamed up with childhood action figures (although the Ewoks are, so far, nowhere to be seen). But it’s also far too tidy a narrative sequence to truly represent the mayhem of a 40-player match of Battlefront. And it raises more questions than it answers. The Y-Wings were called in as an AI airstrike, but could players be piloting those bombers, taking out AT-ATs from above? Will players on the Empire side be controlling the AT-ATs? How will each side win in Walker Assault? And how will spawning work? Unless you’re the star of a tightly controlled demo, you’re probably going to die a few times per round.
DICE is staying tight-lipped for now. “It’s very important for us to create a true Star Wars environment,” says Craig Mcleod, another producer on Battlefront. “We want it to feel real. There are so many different aspects to this. It goes from the ground up. So when you think about that initial layer of infantry combat on the ground, then you add ground vehicles and the walker combat on top of that, then you go into another layer of dogfighting between X-Wings and TIE Fighters... [Walker Assault is] where we’re looking to put all our components in there.”
Other modes, says Mcleod, will be suited to different numbers of players, all the way down to intimate eight player battles. DICE isn’t talking about what those modes are, but we do know what we won’t be seeing in this iteration of Battlefield. The prequel trilogy? It’s out. No clone troopers or buffoonish battle droids. Space battles? Those have been nixed, too. “We’re focusing on epic planetary battles for this game,” Mcleod says.
The list of planets has also been cut down. There are only four this time around: Tatooine, Hoth, Endor, and newcomer Sullust, a planet of snowy blue and jutting black rock and erupting orange lava. DICE’s developers talked excitedly about the amount of work that went into bringing those planets to life in Battlefield. The teams travelled to redwood forests in northern California to capture photo references for Endor. They went to Iceland for Hoth and Sullust. And early in production, they travelled to Lucasfilm’s Skywalker ranch to mine the archives for precious materials: Ralph McQuarrie’s original concept artwork, stormtrooper costumes used in the films, Darth Vader’s helmet, the models of X-Wings and TIE Fighters and the Millennium Falcon.
Some of Battlefront’s 3D models were created with a process called photogrammetry: DICE’s artists took hundreds of photos of stormtrooper armour and the various ship models to bring them to life in the game, scuff marks and all. DICE convinced me that Battlefront will be the best-looking Star Wars game ever made, and the most slavishly faithful to the original trilogy. The question is, will it be, you know... fun? Will it feel like the often-goofy Battlefront games of old, or will it feel like a carbon copy of the Battlefield experience?
It’s still impossible to say at this point, and DICE’s linear demo of Walker Assault didn’t help much. But we did get a few details that help dial-in Battlefront’s combat. A minute into the demo, the starring Rebel trooper switches from firstperson to third-person, hip-firing a blaster rifle with a fairly minimalist reticule on screen for aiming. There are seemingly no iron sights to be found, though at one point he scopes in with a sniper rifle. Still, DICE seems to have kept the feel of classic Battlefront’s aiming more or less intact.
“This is one of the most requested things that we’ve seen when we read forums or tweets,” Mcleod says. “It was really important for us that we include both first- and third-person. And that’s something you’ll be able to swap at any time. Trying to get the balance between first-person and third-person right is something we’re incredibly dedicated to doing. We have our animators working incredibly hard to make sure both options are equally viable and that neither one of them gives a particular advantage over the other.”
Also returning: hero units. The demo climaxes with the Rebel trooper entering an Imperial bunker, only to watch a comrade levitate off the ground, choking, before being tossed to the side like a doll. There’s some familiar breathing. Mechanical. Ominous. Of course it’s Darth Vader. Of course he bats aside blaster bolts with his lightsaber as he walks towards the camera. And then... well, cut to black. DICE confirmed that Vader and Boba Fett are both playable in Battlefront, but didn’t specify how you’ll take control of them. The Millennium Falcon also showed up in Battlefront’s trailer, so the Rebels will no doubt have their iconic heroes, too.
Given DICE’s history, it’s hard to watch Battlefront in action without seeing shades of its most famous franchise. And there are features in Battlefront that have been adapted from Battlefield. There’s the Partner system, for example, that works similarly to Battlefield’s squads. You’ll always be able to see and spawn on your partner. You also share unlocks, so depending on how far you are through Battlefront’s progression system, you’ll be able to help your partner out with more weapon choices.
“We approached the creation and conceptualisation of Battlefront in a way where we said: of course we are DICE, we are a Battlefield studio, so of course there’s incredible heritage from that,” says Sigurlína Ingvarsdottir. “But we were so mindful of the fact that we wanted to make this franchise our own. We wanted to give it its own identity. We wanted it to feel like Star Wars and not be directly comparable to something else... We’re a studio that’s very identified with Battlefield, and of course we’re taking Battlefront which is an existing franchise, and both of these things inspire what we’re doing, but we’re making our own thing.”
Case in point: there’s no Battlefieldesque class system in Battlefront, although there will be progression and unlocks. “We allow you to create your own loadout,” Mcleod says. “If you want to be one of those players that’s a frontline run and gun, you’ll be able to create a loadout that allows you to do this. If you’re more defence or more of a team player, we’ll allow you to do that as well.”
Like Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront will be focused on online multiplayer. But unlike Battlefield and the classic Battlefront games, there won’t be a campaign this time around. Instead, DICE is offering up some bite-size missions that recreate iconic moments from the original trilogy, to be played singleplayer or co-op (the consoles get splitscreen, but PC gamers will be limited to online co-op). A special multiplayer DLC pack called The Battle of Jakku, which bridges the gap between Star Wars Episode VI and Episode VII, will also be freely available to everyone who owns Battlefront a month after release. The desert planet of Jakku, featured prominently in The Force Awakens’ teaser trailers, plays host to a climactic battle between the Empire and the Rebellion, one year after the Battle of Endor.
Battlefront awakens
With little to go on but its name, The Battle of Jakku is still more exciting than the narrow slice of perfectly arranged action DICE has been willing to show so far. We’ve all been to the galaxy far, far away hundreds of times. We’ve towcabled AT-ATs and fought on the surfaces of Endor and Tatooine. Sure, they’ve never looked as good as they do in Frostbite. And hopefully DICE’s shooter pedigree will make those activities just as fun as they were the first hundred times. But Sullust and The Battle of Jakku are, at least, a taste of something new.
As Star Wars goes through its most promising and exciting revival in decades, EA’s flagship Star Wars game should be channelling that energy. Respect the classics, but give us something new we’ve never seen or played. And is mod support too much to ask for? I know, I know. Don’t tell me the odds.