How Star Wars Battlefront 2 plans to take the series to the dark side
Star Wars has a pretty good history of letting us play as the baddies. Whether it’s asserting Imperial dominance in TIE Fighter or encouraging Kyle Katarn to explore his dark side just to see the hammy ’90s FMVs in Jedi Knight, PC gaming has given us plenty of opportunities to see this universe from the bad-guy perspective. What you’ve never really seen in Star Wars, outside of the books, is the Empire portrayed with any nuance of morality or motivation, in the way that Rogue One (semi-successfully) portrays the Rebellion as ruthless saboteurs. Battlefront II’s new singleplayer campaign is an attempt to do just that, casting you as Iden Versio, an Imperial special forces operative who is 100% dedicated to the cause.
“With something like Rogue One, you see Saw Gerrera and his group of more extreme Rebels, and they present a grey side of the good,” Lucasfilm’s Douglas Reilly tells me. “So we were interested in looking at, what’s the grey side of the bad? And that comes from a place of—when you take off that stormtrooper helmet—who is that person underneath? Why do they believe what they believe? Why do they feel the Empire is the right place to be? We wanted to explore what that meant to an individual who was truly committed and raised in the Empire, and absolutely fully believes in that. To her, and to the Empire, she is a hero.”
Iden’s father is a high-ranking general within the Empire, and she comes from Vardos, one of the game’s new planets, which is a red-tinged Imperial utopia styled somewhere between the Citadel in Mass Effect and the posh rooftops of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. There, the Rebel Alliance is seen as a terrorist group. Iden’s the sort of hero who inspires young people on Imperial planets to sign up to the academy, and Vardos is a stronghold of citizens who believe in the Empire’s ideology (which, from what I can tell of decades of watching Star Wars, is basically just oppressing filthy freedom-likers with lasers and posturing gloomily).
Her story begins at the end of Return of the Jedi, as she disbelievingly watches the second Death Star explode from the forests of Endor. Iden vows to avenge the Emperor. Her tale continues over the mostly unseen 30 years that separate Jedi and The Force Awakens, eventually leading to the creation of Starkiller base by the First Order. A character-centric tale set across three decades is no small addition to a game series known primarily for big, silly battles involving faceless soldiers. “We’ll see her grow but maintain her commitment in her beliefs across that period of time,” says Motive’s Paola Jouyaux.
Iden has a robot sidekick, too. If the Rebellion’s droids are characterised as friendly and occasionally camp sidekicks, the Empire’s are right bastards. Iden’s robot pal looks like a small version of an Imperial probe droid, like a sci-fi version of those drones that are steadily popping up in just about every big game these days.
“He’s slightly more evil than the companion droids you’re used to,” says Joyaux. “And he has this wide set of abilities coming from the Empire, so he really elevates Iden above the usual stormtroopers in the battlefield by giving her special skills. He can slice, he can shield her, he can shock people and he can take down enemies for her.” The droid is a key character in the story, but it sounds like they’re more colleagues than BFFs. “It really has this symbiotic relationship with Iden, and it’s very much part of her journey.”
There’s definitely a sense that they feel the need to win us round after the reaction to the first game. While I think people were initially satisfied by the spectacle of seeing AT-ATs march across Hoth in DICE’s Frostbite tech, there were few long-term reasons to keep playing Battlefront. And a few of the set pieces that arrived as DLC—like the Death Star—really should’ve been in the game at launch. There’s certainly evidence in Battlefront II’s reveal that they’ve learned their lesson, and having three developers working on the game means it’s easier for them to ram it with stuff to do.
The multiplayer will benefit from taking place across every era of the Star Wars saga, rather than just one. In terms of revealed heroes and planets so far, it looks like there’s a lot in there. Backdrops include Hoth, Mos Eisley, Kamino, Starkiller Base, Yavin IV, Endor, the aforementioned new planet Vardos, as well as other new worlds not announced yet. The footsoldiers will match the era, too, so you can expect to see everything from clone soldiers and trade federation battle droids, right up to First Order stormtroopers.
Space battles have been added to Battlefront II, having previously appeared in the last game’s Rogue One and Death Star DLC. The entire vehicle combat system has been overhauled by Criterion, applying their Burnout expertise to the handling and experience of being in a cockpit, having worked on a well-received Star Wars VR game on PS4 last year. It was easy to manoeuvre an X-Wing or TIE Fighter in the first game, but the Fighter Squadron mode didn’t have enough depth or options to be anything more than a fun aside, occasionally spoiled by some utterly overpowered arse tearing it up in the Falcon. Here, up to 24 players can scrap across the Imperial dockyards, or even in between asteroids, and hero vehicles return, too.
While the classes are fixed, the game has a new ability system that lets you customise your soldiers. Annoyingly, I couldn’t get DICE to be too specific about how these or the game’s progression systems work, but they sound like a series of secondary combat commands that you can tailor to your play style and level up. They include things like grenades, personal shields and laser trip mines. “What you want to do is give your trooper a little bit of personality,” Diemer says. “And for that, you need to be able to customise them in some way so it feels right. I really like using grenades, so I might try to pull my class a little bit towards my favourite toy or my favourite gadget.”
You can even customise hero characters, for example adding a mind control Force power to Rey, or Force pull and push to Kylo Ren. Even vehicles and hero ships have changeable abilities, with apparently consistent progression across everything in the game. New ground transportation options are coming to Battlefront, too, such as tauntauns that can headbutt enemies (pretty sure that’s not canon either, but why not?), as well as tanks and speeders.
And yet, even with all the revamped multiplayer options, the part of EA’s Battlefront II plan that I’m most excited about is that singleplayer. They talk about it like they’re trying to make a contemporary Star Wars story that can credibly sit alongside the likes of Rogue One and The Force Awakens, which is a brave pursuit for a campaign tied to a large-scale FPS. But The Old Republic aside, it’s been six years since we got to play a cinematic solo story set in the Star Wars universe, and even longer since anyone made a good one. The idea of exposing the Empire’s shades of grey is compelling, and something I genuinely want to see play out. Not that I condone the extinguishing of all human and alien life by a big weaponised space ball, of course.
