30 seconds of footage for Star Wars: Battlefront 2 managed to find its way onto the internet. I mean, come on… it’s the internet for crying out loud! Of course footage was going to be leaked. Well, the 30 second clip features a voice-over of a soldier while they showcase more of the gorgeous rendering capabilities of the Frostbite 3 game engine.
The trailer reveals a lot to be so short. For instance, we find out that Rey from Episode VII: The Force Awakens and from Episode VIII: The Last Jedi will be in the game and she will have a blue lightsaber. We also find out that Yoda and Darth Maul will also be in the game, and that they will focus on all eras of the Star Wars mythos, including the Clone Wars and the Galactic War. I don’t know if this also means covering The Old Republic or the Sith Wars, but it would be cool if they at least ventured out a little bit and got creative.
Anyway, you can check out the 30 second video below, courtesy of The SpicinBerg.
bf2 from TheSpicinberg on Vimeo.
The cinematics look good, obviously. There’s never been a doubt that the in-engine capabilities of the Frostbite under tender, love and care from DICE is a remarkable and powerful piece of software engineering at work. However, we don’t get any actual gameplay.
This seems to be a bit of a cop-out given that I was pretty sure we were promised gameplay? Anyway, it is an actual reveal… just more of a cinematic reveal.
The lighting looks great and the effects look great, but that was never the issue with the first Star Wars: Battlefront outing from DICE.
This time around they do at least seem to promise a campaign mode. Typical to today’s standards, it features a female lead. I don’t think anyone would be surprised at that revelation. Except, what is surprising is that it’s a female lead… on the Empire’s side. I’m curious how they’ll weave this into the story because while I know they got rid of the clones and replaced the Storm Troopers with regular people, they still usually kept the men as their boots on the ground. Perhaps she’s an officer or a special assassin? Maybe an offshoot of the kick-butt Death Troopers?
She appears to be wearing a pilot’s uniform, so maybe the focus of the campaign will be on her as a pilot, which could be pretty cool depending on how they handle it. Of course, nothing really compares to what Free Radical was doing with being able to go from ground to the air to space all in one level. I doubt DICE will attempt to go for that with Star Wars: Battlefront II.
Another thing that could be fun is the fact that it appears the Hero Assault Mode is coming back, or at least that’s what the trailer seemed to imply. It was one of the most popular online modes that people dived into on Xbox Live back in the day in Pandemic’s version of Star Wars: Battlefront II. If it makes a return it could end up being a popular mode in DICE’s sequel as well.
Of course, there’s still the big elephant in the room: the piss poor structure for the gameplay.
Star Cards, vehicles as item pick-ups, no hijacking, boring aerial combat, small maps, boring auto-aim gunplay, and lack of teamwork.
I don’t know how much they plan on fixing/changing/etc., to accommodate actual Battlefront fans, but casuals just latch onto whatever is popular and they can’t be expected to make the sequel a blockbuster seller. So EA and DICE are going to have to put time and effort into the second game.
We’ll see what they have to announce come April 15th. I am a bit surprised that they have Episode VIII: The Last Jedi content scheduled to arrive in the game, so it looks like EA may have paid extra to license content from the newer movie. Of course, though, they’re reserving the Episode VIII content as pre-order bonuses. Should anyone have expected anything less from EA?
Star Wars: Battlefront II is scheduled to release on PC, PS4 and Xbox One later this year.
