While trailer for DICE’s upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront is still a little ways off, there is already a lot of news coming out of the Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim that give us some hints about what we can expect from the Battlefield developer’s take on first-person galactic warfare.
According to a report by Eurogamer, Battlefront will have a 40-player multiplayer cap and will not feature a single-player campaign. However, Eurogamer also report that DICE manager Patrick Bach explained that Battlefront will have special missions designed for solo or cooperative play.
Sounds a bit like the Titanfall approach, except potentially more sensible? Where Titanfall just used the campaign as a backdrop for a series of standard multiplayer matches, it sounds like Battlefront will give you some kind of Star Wars vignette that you can enjoy outside the chaos of a big multiplayer battle royale.
The game is due out on the 17th of November in the US, and the 20th in the UK (sorry, UK readers). According to a report from the Associated Press, Battlefront will also include a free level called “Battle of Jakku”. Eurogamer explain that people who preorder Battlefront will get access to Battle of Jakku on the 1st of December.
If Jakku doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s the planet with the crashed Star Destroyer we saw in yesterday’s very cool trailer for The Force Awakens.
The AP also reported that you’ll be able to play as Darth Vader and Boba Fett at some point. Over at IGN, unreconstructed Star Wars fanboy Mitch Dyer has a lot more detail on how the “hero” characters and vehicles will work. It kind of sounds like they are characters that spawn when players are on a hot streak. So your reward for being “in the zone” could be getting to play as one of the major characters for a few minutes.
Best of all: no prequel trilogy stuff. It’s going to be focusing on the stuff from the original trilogy, the things we all know and love: Hoth, Endor, Tatooine… and Sallust. OK, I guess it’s nice that the Sallustans are getting their due, rather than just being strapped into a chair alongside Lando Calrissian and taken for a ride.
PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon got time with a hands-off demo running on a PS4. I love how much Star War atmosphere seems to be packed into the game, and it’s interesting to note that Fenlon doesn’t see a lot of outright similarities between this new game and the Battlefield series. No iron sights, for instance, nor class system.
I do like the sound of the Walker Assault mode, which basically sounds like various versions of the Battle of Hoth taking place across a variety of settings. Calling in Y-Wing strikes on Imperial armor? God help me,I’m back in, baby!