That kind of scale is crucial for Battlefront where the Battle of Hoth is such an iconic scene. They want to capture that ”epic, Star Wars, all-out huge scale” and run with it.
DICE has already said they want to inject their DNA into the Battlefront series, but just rehashing wants been done before isn’t going to be enough. Star Wars operates by different rules.
”Battlefront is a vehicle experience, it’s a character experience. DICE has proven, in how they develop Battlefield, as far as being able to do air, land, sea combat, all the way up to F-18s fighting,” Frank Gibeau told IGN.
”They’ve been able to demonstrate through the Frostbite tech and through their design capabilities and talent that they can create these huge, epic set-piece wars. That’s kind of the dream of Battlefront. Hoth, the battle of Hoth. You’ve got space, you’ve got the surface, you’ve got infantry, you’ve got AT-ATs. That’s the table stakes that they come in with. They know how to do that. They’re really good at it.”
”But they’re not just going to ape what we’ve seen in the past,” he continued.
”They’re going to bring their own sensibilities and design ideas. We want to innovate. We want to try new things. You guys had a blog on your site that said, ‘hey, what would you like to see in Battlefront?’ There’s a lot of stuff in there that we’re planning on doing. There’s a lot of new stuff that we’re looking at too. From our perspective, it’s capturing that epic, Star Wars, all-out huge scale. That’s what we’ll go after.”
Overall EA isn’t making a hit and run on the Star Wars IP - they want it for the long haul.
”We signed a long-term deal so that we could really invest. This isn’t just a one-off,” he said.
“We want to create experiences that operate in the Star Wars universe, not just mimicking the movies. It’ll be complementing the movies, the way that the Batman games have done. It’s in the world of DC’s comics, the world of Batman, but it’s not a literal playback of the film. That’s our first assumption.”
”The second assumption is that we think we can tell Star Wars stories in multiple genres. We’re going to look at multiple genres in multiple ways – to tell stories from a character point of view, from an epic all-out vehicle war point of view. It’s a very versatile place to go. It’s a very versatile place to design games. We’re going to do it over the long term.”
”You’re going to see lots of different experiences from us.”
CloudCity coming soon! Warning: Constant connection to the EA Cloud required, less your city plummet to the planet surface below. Carbonite Freezing Fun Park DLC $9.99!
