New Details on Sullust, Multiplayer Maps in Star Wars: Battlefront
By Kyle Warnke
Star Wars Day is bringing us tons of news from around the galaxy, and this latest piece concerns new information about the upcoming video game Star Wars: Battlefront.
EA has confirmed that Battlefront will have 12 multiplayer maps available at launch, according to an essay they published on the game’s website detailing the development of one of the levels on the new planet Sullust.
They went on to say that that number does not include all of the actual “Star Wars: Battlefront Missions,” so it appears there will be more maps available in the single-player campaign.
The entire piece is mainly about how employees of DICE, the studio developing the game, traveled to Iceland to gain inspiration for the volcanic world of Sullust. The planet got a shout-out by Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, but until recently it hadn’t been seen at all.
Although Sullust will make its big debut in Battlefront, the planet has already appeared in a piece of new canon lore. Marvel’s Princess Leia comic last week actually took place in an underground base on the planet, offering us our first glimpse of a rocky, lava-flooded environment. It even gave us a look at a species that lives in those underground caverns called rockrenders.
The DICE developers noted that although they had plenty of material to use for recreating established worlds like Hoth and Endor’s moon, they had to build Sullust from scratch. In addition to Iceland, they visited the Lucasfilm archives and snapped photos of the original Death Star, trying to gain a sense of Imperial architecture. According to them, Sullust will be a base of Imperial operations, so they had to come up with different structures and facilities that the Empire might have built on the planet.
“It’s all about grounding in reality. Everything needs to look like something you could actually imagine existing. That’s what we wanted to do with Sullust…make it feel out of this world but like it could actually exist.” – Andrew Hamilton, Lead Environment Artist
Interestingly, they also mention that Sullust has four “themes.” These include a lava theme, a sulphur theme, a Death Star theme and a mine theme. Could these be mini-locations within a level? Will there be multiple levels set on the same planet, just with different themes?
Star Wars: Battlefront is out on Nov. 17 on Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Windows PC. There will be a DLC level featuring the planet of Jakku released on Dec. 8 for all players, but if you pre-order the game, you can get access to the DLC a week earlier.
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