Electronic Arts’s chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, implied a sequel to last year’s Star Wars: Battlefront is coming in 2017.
During an earnings call yesterday, Jorgensen talked about Star Wars: Battlefront and impending new content coming in 2017. Whether this new content will turn up in a sequel or through updates to the original game is not clear. But a lot of sites, including our source PC Gamer, believe a Battlefront II is in the works.
From Jorgensen:
"“Next year we’ll see Star Wars Battlefront back with bigger and better worlds, because we now have the new movies to work off [and] not just the historical movies that we used before….”"
2015’s Battlefront was met with mixed reviews. While many fans enjoy playing it, they were disappointed by the lack of worlds and overarching story campaigns. The original two Battlefront games (the first one released in 2004, its sequel in 2005) had both multiple worlds to choose from and different story lines to follow. The new one seems to be more focused on online group play, with main heroes and villains you can unlock who don’t necessarily fit canonically on the planet you’re playing them on (like Luke Skywalker fighting Darth Vader on Hoth in his Return of the Jedi costume).
More from Dork Side of the Force
- The High Republic Adventures (2023) 1 review
- Daniel José Older named a High Republic Adventures character after someone special
- How animation changed Star Wars: Ewoks and Droids
- Kelleran Beq comes to Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes
- The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal becomes No. 1 on IMDb’s Starmeter for 2023
I don’t buy the idea that EA has more content to add now because of the new movies, as if they didn’t have enough to draw from before. There were plenty of worlds and stories they could have taken inspiration from, both from the original trilogy and the prequels (they could even have added in some planets and characters from The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels). But, once again, it’s important to remember which audiences Disney wants to appeal to: the older fans who were disappointed by the prequels, and the new fans whose first experience with Star Wars was The Force Awakens. Planets like Takodana, D’Qar, and Starkiller Base (Jakku is already a playable map in the first Battlefront) will be most familiar to the latter group, and that group is who Disney is trying to catch and keep the attention of the most.
More than anything, I hope the Battlefront sequel (or update, or whatever form the new content will arrive in) comes with campaigns which will make playing the game more worthwhile and challenging. A wide variety of locations is fine, but missions are what is engaging.
Next: Disney Infinity, Which Included Star Wars Sets, Is Cancelled
Check back to Dork Side for more updates on a possible Star Wars: Battlefront II.