14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at DICE that’s currently working on Star Wars Battlefront is not yet willing to deliver any actual details about the game itself and its core mechanics, but the studio is ready to reveal that the collaboration with its partners at Lucasfilm is a very positive one.
Karl-Magnus Troedsson, the leader of the company, tells CVG that in many ways, the core game making process is similar to that involved in the creation of a Battlefield series, which means that the focus is on creating a team of passionate developers who are given a solid framework to work on.
The studio general manager states, “The only difference is of course that we're working with an outside partner in Lucasfilm. I can't go into all the details about how that collaboration works, but what I can see is that it's been an overwhelmingly positive experience.”
Star Wars Battlefront is a shooter with a heavy multiplayer component that will keep many of the core elements of the series, but will also use a set of mechanics that DICE has created specifically for it.
Troedsson adds, “The way that I would sum it up is we have one game team with a lot of experience building games, who are so passionate about Star Wars, and then you have a team inside Lucasfilm who are also gamers and want to see us make a great game. The two groups are basically coming together: passionate people with one task at hand. It's been a very cool collaboration.”
Lucasfilm, which is at the moment owned by Disney, has entered into an exclusive deal with publisher Electronic Arts to create video games based on Star Wars, specifically the coming movie trilogy that is at the moment in development.
Star Wars Battlefront will use the new Frostbite 3 engine, which means that gamers will probably be able to destroy terrain around them and significantly customize their characters.
The shooter will also include some of the iconic vehicles and special weapons that are associated with the series, although it’s unclear how big a role Jedis will have.
Inside Electronic Arts, BioWare and Visceral Games are also working on titles based on the movie series, although no details about them have been offered so far.
Star Wars Battlefront is expected to arrive on the PC, the PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox One from Microsoft at some point in the second or the third quarter of next year.