One of the marquee titles at this year’s E3 in Los Angeles will no doubt be Star Wars Battlefront, and EA’s long-awaited title is shaping up to be one of the biggest releases of 2015, piggybacking off the hype brought about by J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens. At its core, though, DICE’s take on the beloved series very much represents a reboot, and the studio’s General Manager Patrick Bach spoke to Official PlayStation Magazine about the decision to take Battlefront back to its roots.
I think what we did was instead of trying to build upon the old games, we went back and said let’s start over. Let’s analyse the good and the bad, like we did with old games, but it’s more about going back to the core idea that Battlefront stands for, and then building on that. Because otherwise you will create a version of somebody else’s game, and that’s not what we do!
It’s fascinating to hear Bach discuss the team’s method of approach, stripping away much of the legacy that has been established through recent installments and instead focusing on the core foundations – much like Disney’s approach with the derided prequels. In fact, this explains DICE’s decision to brand Star Wars Battlefront as is, rather than the third numerical entry in the series. However, while the company has the utmost respect for the source material, come November, the final product will very much embody what a DICE product ought to be.
We build our own games, we build something that breathes ‘DICE’. We wanted to take a fresh stance on the concept of Battlefront, rather than saying ‘let’s take that feature and call it the same thing’, or ‘let’s remove that feature’. It will just get messy. So you have to see it as a reboot.
Star Wars Battlefront has been slated for a release on November 17 across Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.