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How Battlefront 2 expands the Star Wars Universe
The game's writer and art director reveal the new characters, ships and storylines that they're most proud of in the Star Wars sequel.
We were able to play Star Wars: Battlefront 2’s early single player missions recently and have come away with a much better idea of how the game is shaping up. In short, it plays more like an extension of multiplayer than you might have expected – all wrapped up in a gorgeous world and a brand new Star Wars story that feels absolutely right.
We also spoke with Mitch Dyer, co-writer of Battlefront 2’s single-player campaign, and Chris Matthews, art director for the campaign at EA Motive, about their five favourite elements in the game. Unsurprisingly, both loved inventing fresh things for such a treasured franchise.
1. The Imperial planet of Vardos
Vardos is the Imperial home world
© EA / DICE
Vardos is an Imperial home world and that's something we've not seen anywhere in the Star Wars galaxy to date.
Chris Matthews: It's so rare that you have the opportunity to create anything in the Star Wars galaxy. Since Kathleen Kennedy took the reins and the Star Wars galaxy was streamlined, large parts of the story were pulled into Legends. Vardos is an Imperial home world and that's something we've not seen anywhere in the Star Wars galaxy to date.
We can't tell you too much about it, but we did travel the world for inspiration. Mitch had written a great bio that gave us a nice framework to start creating the visuals. But where it really struck home was when we touched on a really strong key colour – red. I started thinking of Japanese maple trees, which kind of look like big bonsai trees, then we started to latch on to bonsai trees as the ultimate expression of control versus nature, which is very much what the Empire represents. From that point you just start fleshing the city out.
Mitch Dyer: It's really cool because we got to explore life in an Imperial city – what does it look like? How are the roads built? How do the people live? How is it laid out structurally? What people look like, what they wear, what the centrepieces of architecture are, what the aesthetic of it all is like...
It's really exciting to get to see something you love get developed – it's featured a lot in the novel, where Christie Golden, the author, gets into a lot of the myth and the history of the people there. There's a myth associated with the trees that's really weird, dark and cool – that's the sort of stuff that makes it feel authentic to me.
2. The Corvus
The Inferno Squad's ship
© EA / DICE
CM: The Corvus is based on an Imperial Class 2 Raider, which was a ship developed for a Star Wars tabletop game. When we started out trying to find something cool for Inferno Squad to ride around the galaxy doing special forces things in, we started like many developers do by trying to design something new.
We knew we wanted something Star Destroyer-esque, only smaller, so we looked through the franchise and started developing lots of ships. Then, one of the designers said, 'there's this ship and it's not considered canon any more' – the board game stuff had been moved into Legends.
So we took a look at it and it had a lot of the aspects we were looking for, especially the TIE Interceptor wings, which were something that then started to mirror our character. But it wasn't a fully resolved design – it didn't have a hangar, it didn't have landing gears.
MD: It just had a shape - they made the models and thought it looked cool, but the dimensions weren't exactly what we needed and so on, so we had to flex that a little bit to make it appropriate.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 looks beautiful
© EA / DICE
Now LucasFilm has a ship that can go on anywhere in the franchise now - it's authentic
CM: Talking to LucasFilm, we had to cover every detail, from the doors to how things moved – there are very particular specifications for things like how quickly motors and hinges move, margins that you need around a TIE Fighter... there was a huge amount of work.
Conservatively hundreds of hours went in to just resolving those design details. But the end goal is now LucasFilm has a ship that can go on anywhere in the franchise now – it's authentic, it's part of the Star Wars universe.
That's the really cool thing about the story – because we've had the opportunity to create these things, writers and authors inside the Star Wars universe can take Inferno Squad and everything else and weave it into their stories in the same way that we've touched on the heroes and have had to find them in the timeline and what they're doing in the story at that moment.
3. A Luke Skywalker story
Luke Skywalker stars in a new story
© EA / DICE
We get to explore who Luke Skywalker has become after Return of the Jedi
MD: We got to tell a Luke Skywalker story. Luke is such a precious character to Star Wars and LucasFilm. After Return of the Jedi this is a guy who has lost his father who just had his big moment of redemption, he found out Leia is his sister, he's a Jedi knight, the Emperor is dead, his friends are all celebrating on Endor... he's processing a lot of things. That's an emotionally raw state to be in, and we get to explore a bit of who that guy is, who Luke Skywalker has become after Return of the Jedi, on a journey that – eventually – leads to where he is in The Force Awakens.
It is surreal to be able to write a Luke Skywalker story, especially for a game like this where we're focused on other characters. Their path intersects with heroes in a way we hope is organic. We never wanted a moment where you're playing as Luke Skywalker and he's doing his own thing, so you forget about Inferno Squad for a bit. His story is connected to Inferno Squad, though he's definitely doing his own thing.
LucasFilmhad so many good ideas, too – they weren't just there to say 'no' or 'yes' to us doing a Luke Skywalker story, or to say we had to do it in a particular way. They are storytellers, producers, filmmakers – they work very closely with storytellers. They are constantly throwing around and banking ideas, wondering about the kind of stuff we're talking about, so they had a ton of contributions to that in a way that did nothing but benefit the story.
4. ID-10 – the Dark Side of droids
CM: A lot of us folks at Motive are fans of the Dark Side of the Force - everybody loves the Rebels, but it's a very human element to have appreciation of the Dark Side as well. I'm also a big fan of robots – I've been developing them in games for a really long time now, so when we had an opportunity to flesh out the ID-10 droid, this was a great mark of pride for the studio, that we've been able to get a new droid into Star Wars.
We wanted a companion for Iden that was capable of expressing a lot of emotion, but was also a vicious little bugger
We started by coming up with ideas with Doug Chan, art director across the whole franchise. We set out with astromechs at one point and BB-8 at the other end – we wanted a droid from just after Return of the Jedi, so we started designing what the first rolling droid looked like. We developed 2-300 different droids, then we bridged over into the Viper droids and the Parrot droids from the Clone Wars. There you've got one the size of a teacup and a giant – Viper droids are huge.
We wanted a companion for Iden that was capable of expressing a lot of emotion, but was also a vicious little bugger. It's a great opening to the game that you start out as ID-10 – it kind of mirrors A New Hope in that you see the droids, then you meet the characters. We wanted to add some authenticity to our experience by doing that as well.
As you spend more time with ID-10, your understanding of the droid grows, more functions are revealed, and you find more interesting gameplay techniques. Of course it's always there and has got your back, which is what a good Star Wars droid does.
Kylo Ren has a role in Battlefront 2's story
© EA / DICE
I cannot wait for people to see the Kylo Ren mission
MD: [Speaking of the Dark Side], we have a Kylo Ren mission – I can't say anything about it except that I literally cannot believe it exists. We got to do some things that I did not expect anybody would ever say yes to – we threw all the wildest ideas we had on the table and people just kept saying yes. I cannot wait for people to see that mission.
5. Iden Versio
Iden is the star of this Star Wars story
© EA / DICE
MD: We were able to create a new hero for the Star Wars universe. Iden is really special to us – we started out with this character and she was totally redefined by Janina Gavankar when we hired her. We brought Janina in after an incredible audition, and as I got to know her I realised that this character couldn't just be who she was on the page, we had to rewrite the script around Janina. We rewrote the character completely.
Her performance was so strong and different than what we had expected. We had written somebody a bit more cold and calculated, and Janina brought something a little more fiery and reactive to the character and it fit in a way that we didn't expect. But it was perfect.
It connected with DICE on a really emotional level, too – they brought her over to multiplayer and made her a playable hero. So now she gets to fight alongside the likes of Darth Vader and Han Solo... that is incomprehensible to me.
Star Wars Battlefront is something that has always meant a lot to me, so having a hero that we made in multiplayer is super-super special.
We went to really extreme lengths to make sure that we caught perfect scans of her
The Force Awakens' Maz also stars
© EA / DICE
CM: Janina not only changed the story, she changed how we were working. As a big fan of facial animation and trying to make sure it's on point in games, her performances were so detailed, she had so many microexpressions and I wanted to capture all of that.
So we went to really extreme lengths to make sure that we caught perfect scans of her, which of course then require plenty of work to get into the game, but give her a much more realistic face. We had specialist rigs made for animation, we did loads of pickup performance captures – it's been almost a multi-studio effort to increase the quality of skin textures, and just make sure that performance wasn't lost in any way when it comes through into the game.
Her armour is unique, too. At first, she looks just like a TIE pilot, but it's Inferno armour and it's crafted for her. You'll see that she and her squadmates wear their armour in different ways, which is totally unique to the Empire. There are characters who have their own special armour, but if you're a Stormtrooper or a pilot, you wear your armour as it's stamped out in the factory. The fact that these guys customise their own armour, wear it in different ways and have their own deal going on is something very unique to this group.
Also, she has red eyes because we love Darth Vader.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 is released on November 17 on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
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