Imagine the pressure involved in making a Star Wars game that is releasing a month ahead of an all-new Star Wars movie. Now double it, because that game is a Battlefront title, and then double it again because it’s being made by DICE. Subtract the number you first thought of and then multiply it by Episode VII. Yeah. That kind of pressure.
However, as we sit down with Sigurlína Ingvarsdottir, senior producer on Battlefront, in DICE’s hometown of Stockholm, we have to say that she and her team seem to be handling it remarkably well. As we ask her how it feels to be introducing fans to JJ Abrams’ vision of the Star Wars universe, she has a smile on her face.
“Now that you’ve put it like that, pretty daunting!” she laughs. “No, it feels like an incredible privilege to get to do that with this game. We’re excited that this is a new world that people haven’t seen before, and we’re excited about how it’s connected to The Force Awakens as well.”
She is, of course, talking about the Battle of Jakku DLC, which is being made available to everyone, for free, shortly after the game’s launch. It sets the scene for Abrams’ The Force Awakens, as we visit a new location for the first time and take part in a battle that occurs 30 years before the events of Episode VII. We’ve already seen the crashed Star Destroyer in trailers for the upcoming movie – in Battlefront, you’ll be able to find out what happened during that battle.
Sadly, we didn’t get to play through that level during our time with the game, but we did get a meaty slice of hands-on time with the game ahead of its public beta, and it raised as many questions as it did thrills.
KEEPING IT REAL
As you crunch through the snow on Hoth, a blaster in your hand, a dozen other Rebels behind you and TIE fighters screaming overhead, it’s easy to get carried away. This is Star Wars! We’re living it! Never has the universe looked and felt so real. We have to hand it to DICE – it has absolutely nailed the feeling of the Star Wars movies, and it’s one of the best parts of the game.
Of course, the graphics are a huge part of that – we first played on an PC with all the settings on high, and it looks just as stunning on the Xbox One – but there’s more to the realism than how many polygons are on the screen at a time. Little details, small touches that only a fanatic will notice, have been recreated perfectly.
“The level of detail of some of the assets is stunning,” says Ingvarsdottir. “If you were to look at our Falcon model as an example, you would find that there is a cluster of scorch marks on it that exactly represents the way it looks in the movie.” While we may not have had a chance to jump into Han Solo’s iconic ship in our playtest (it was just X-wings and TIE fighters for us), we saw tiny touches like this everywhere. It was a labour of love for DICE, who spent hours photographing props and sets at LucasArts. “It’s these little details that it needs to have in order for it to feel authentic,” Ingvarsdottir adds.
Whatever DICE has done, it works. Even the weapons feel totally Star Wars – the team had to take a few liberties with weapons and powerups, but the new armoury still fits the Star Wars universe perfectly. “In the levels, you find these icons that give you power-ups, and some of those are something that you recognise, such as an orbital strike,” explains Ingvarsdottir. “But then we had to invent our own as well, to complement the rest, where we felt like, ‘Okay, Star Wars really doesn’t have that class of weapon and we need it in the game.’ So we have made additions to the arsenal in order to satisfy the design needs.”
“ALL WINGS REPORT IN”
But not every design decision that the team made has been so well received by fans. Recently, after DICE and EA announced that the game wouldn’t feature a single-player campaign at all, fans grabbed their lightsaber pitchforks and flaming blasters and took to the metaphorical streets to complain. Perhaps titles like Titanfall, which was well-received despite its lack of proper story-led campaign mode, helped the decision, but we were keen to find out exactly why DICE had chosen to drop single-player from the experience.
“The core of the original Battlefronts was the multiplayer – it was a multiplayer experience,” explains Ingvarsdottir. “And that’s very natural for us, but very early on in the conversation we also talked about what we wanted to bring in, and we wanted to bring you these experiences that you can play on the couch with a friend, or you can play by yourself. There’s much more than the multiplayer content; the missions, which are a sizable chunk of the game, are designed with replayability and with co-op in mind.”
It’s true – the Missions, like the Survival modewe played on Tatooine, are designed for just one or two players, but after a few rounds we weren’t convinced that it was going to be enough to sustain our single-player desires. At the end of a wave, when a single enemy remained, the large map meant that finding and killing them felt more like a Benny Hill chase scene than a climactic firefight. Plus, the five waves in the beta (there will be fifteen in the final game) felt far too easy. The multiple maps will add some diversity, and new modes like Battle (against another player or AI) should help, but we’re still not sure it’s enough to satisfy players in the long term. We pressed Ingvarsdottir on this, but she remained confident in the team’s decision:
“This composition of multiplayer and missions felt like a good package that was logical together,” she assured us. “I don’t think with the original Battlefronts you think of them in terms of their standout story campaign, although they had an aspect of that. For us, that was the concept we came up with and what we pitched.”
We’ll have to wait and see whether this combination will be enough to satisfy fans when the final game launches, but for now we’re unconvinced. We had more fun in the game’s other two playable modes – Drop Zone and Walker Assault – than we did hunting for a lone Stormtrooper on Tatooine.
KNEE-DEEP IN LASERS
The first of these two modes, Drop Zone, took place on Sullust, the volcanic planet that is based on Ingvarsdottir’s home country, Iceland. The level looks incredible – the blackened rocks and pale sulphur pools offer impressive detail, and as you sprint through the level you’ll hear the wet slap of geysers bubbling away around you. Trust us when we say that you don’t want to fall in.
As escape pods slam into the ground like unexploded WWII bombs, your team’s job is to capture and secure them. Once you’ve claimed a pod, the race to defend it begins, and it’s here that teamwork is vital. Run towards it alone and you can expect a blaster shot between the eyes, but storm in with your buddies and you have a good chance of taking the enemy team down and claiming the power-ups within the pod.
Unfortunately, if you take a hit, you may have to wait to get back into the fight. Respawns were regularly 100 metres (or more) away from the currently-contested escape pod, which made the mode more about sprinting across the rocky landscape than actually getting into the fight. Partnering with a friend lets you spawn with them, which alleviates the problem slightly, but it still really needs to be solved before launch. The other mode, Walker Assault, is where we finally got to live out our dreams of taking part in a full-scale, 40-player battle across a sprawling landscape. The number of options on offer in this mode is outrageous – you can run-and-gun, jump into a Starfighter, take control of turrets, or even become Lord Vader himself (or Luke, of course) and wreak havoc with a lightsaber.
This mode really does play as good as it sounds. With so many players on the battlefield, there’s always someone to shoot, some power-up to find or some objective to complete. The main goal for the Empire is to clear the path for their AT-ATs, while the Rebels are attempting to activate uplinks that will bring in Y-Wing bombers to wipe the giant walkers out. The balancing is impressive – wins were split between the teams during our play through – and if your team plays the objective and doesn’t just charge around in a killing frenzy, you’ve got a great chance of taking the round.
TO THE SKIES
One thing that is less successful, unfortunately, is the flying; the controls were tough to learn, and in Walker Assault mode, taking out ground troops was really tough. It’s classic DICE, though – air vehicles are always hard to control, so we shouldn’t be surprised. What did surprise us, though, was when DICE announced that it wouldn’t include space battles in Battlefront, instead focusing on surface-based arenas for its dogfights. Ingvarsdottir explains the decision for us.
“One of the things that we wanted to give [those battles] is a sense of three-dimensionality,” she says. “[In Fighter Squadron mode] we have the power-ups basically on the surface of the planet; that’s where you swoop down to pick them up, and the environment becomes part of your combat area as well. We feel that this adds quite a lot of variety to the battle.” We can see her point, although we still aren’t totally convinced by the balancing within Fighter Squadron mode, which we played during gamescom in August.
Thankfully, the gunplay so far seems to make up for the small niggles we have with certain modes. Weapons feel unique despite them all, ultimately, shooting red lasers, and the power-ups do a good job of keeping things varied. We’ve still got some problems with the game, but we’re quietly confident DICE can allay them before its launch. You may have noticed that we’ve gone through this entire feature without making a terrible Star Wars reference. If you find our lack of puns… disturbing, we — Oh no, wait. Damn it.