“Who would’ve thought Star Wars would be made in Sweden?”, said Battlefield exec producer Patrick Bach of the studio’s new Battlefront sequel.
Certainly not DICE. By one of those cosmic coincidences that seem to happen most often to creative people, the Battlefield team had been talking idly about Battlefront just weeks before EA acquired their Star Wars license.
“It’s quite interesting. For some strange reason we had a discussion at the office about what happened to Battlefront,” said Bach at a recent BAFTA event in London. “You know, the old IP that someone else made that was a ripoff of Battlefield. Bastards! We should’ve made it. It was a competition of powers. We couldn’t do both at the same time.”
But DICE’s owner was already in talks about a years-long deal for Star Wars.
“For some reason EA was negotiating with Lucas slash Disney, as to whom should make the new Star Wars games,” explained Bach. “And just a week later it was like, ‘Oh, by the way, that discussion you were having about Star Wars? Do you want to make it?’… ‘Well, yeah.’”
Once the studio began pre-production on the new game, however, they dropped their swagger.
“We weren’t as cocky when we got the chance, because to take on something like this is scary, as you can imagine,” he said. “You can only screw up, right?
“We’ve been promising ourselves if we’re doing this we need to do it right. So trust me, we’re hard at work to figure this one out.”
Details on the rebooted competitive shooter / speeder-jacker are scant beyond the E3 teaser embedded above. Along with half of EA’s current upcoming roster, Battlefront will run on Frostbite 3, and will “probably” be out in Summer 2015. And despite similarities in nomenclature, Battlefront won’t be “Star Wars plus Battlefield”.
Can you infer anything else about this long-awaited sequel?