Category Archives: Star Wars Games

Star Wars Battlefront 2 Art Director Discusses Designs

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Via Comicbook.com:

Star Wars Battlefront II has had quite the controversy surrounding it even before the game launched. Despite that, the story campaign in the sequel for the revival of the Battlefront series was stunning, and some of the recreations found in-game were incredibly detailed and spot-on. While many are upset over EA’s pay-to-win model for the title’s multiplayer, others were excited to see more of their favourite universe seen in Star Wars Battlefront II.

Art director Steve Uphill recently sat down alongside producer Robert Wyle and designer John Stanley from Criterion Games to talk a little bit about their work with Lucasfilm regarding the latest Star Wars title. More specifically, they dove right in about the particular Fondor Dock design.

When asked why they wanted to develop Fondor Dock in-game, Steve Uphill said “We always wanted to develop some type of dock and LucasFilm proposed that we focus on a level around Fondor, which is an Imperial Industrial system.We were really excited about this, as Fondor is a planet that hadn’t been shown in film before. So we had an opportunity to get creative and visualize how this location could appear.”

The research that went into the in-game translation came from looking at Star Wars space stations from the franchise, and paying special attention to the Shield Gate seen in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The team took inspiration from aircraft characters, drew up a design, and upon LucasFilm’s approval – got to work.

“For us, the Fondor Dock is a crowning moment. There were other challenges that came out well, such as the Resurgent class Star Destroyer, which was a momentous task that turned out to be a fantastic looking level.”

“There were challenges finding the right balance between art, design, Star Wars authenticity and readability to players,” Uphill stated about the challenged faced during this process. “Fondor Dock is a big structure and the section players get to fly around is probably three or four times the size of a Star Destroyer. For us, it was a case of designing something that looks great from a distance with a real imposing Imperial feel but also looks great close-up.”

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‘Star Wars: Battlefront 2’ Has Solved ‘Last Jedi’ Plot Hole

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Via Nme.com:

This makes a whole lot of sense…

An apparent plot hole in Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been solved in the downloadable content (DLC) for Star Wars: Battlefront II.

Fans were left confused after the opening sequence of The Last Jedi showed Resistance fighters planting bombs inside the First Order’s Dreadnought ship, without offering any prior explanation as to how they knew where to leave the explosive arsenal.

But that very question has now been solved by Battlefront II’s ‘Resurrection’ DLC – and it makes a whole load of sense.

Battlefront II‘s DLC reveals that game protagonist Iden Versio and her daughters obtained the plans to the Dreadnought and “transferred” them to General Leia Organa in an attempt to help the Resistance.

In turn, this meant that Poe Dameron and the Resistance bombers knew exactly where to deploy their bombs.

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After ‘Star Wars’ game uproar, $3 billion in stock value wiped out!

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Via CNBC.com:

Electronic Arts’ shareholders are running for the hills this month and for good reason. The company’s profitable business model is now at risk after angry gamers revolted over its aggressive in-game moneymaking strategy in “Star Wars Battlefront II.”

EA’s stock is down 8.5 percent month to date through Tuesday compared with the S&P 500’s 2 percent gain, wiping out $3.1 billion of shareholder value. Its competitors Take-Two and Activision Blizzard shares are up 5 percent and 0.7 percent respectively during the same time period.

After EA gave a December quarter sales forecast slightly below Wall Street estimates on Oct. 31, some analysts suspected it was due to the “Stars Wars” title. The shares fell 4 percent the following day.

Click Here for the full story at CNBC.com

THE MAKING OF STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT II

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Via Starwars.com:

STARWARS.COM GRABS A CONTROLLER AND GOES INSIDE THE NEW GAME.

With any sequel comes immense pressure. The need to make it as good, if not better, than what came before. The need to make it bigger, either visually, emotionally, or both. The need to have it build upon its predecessor but also stand strongly on its own. When you’re making a video game sequel and it’s called Star Wars Battlefront II, you definitely feel that pressure. This is the story of how Lucasfilm, EA, DICE, Criterion, and Motive rose to the challenge.Press startThe original current-gen Star Wars Battlefront, a multiplayer action shooter, launched in November of 2015, coinciding with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens soon after. The game received strong reviews and went on to sell millions, marking, along with its film cousin, the start of a new era of productivity for a galaxy far, far away. Thanks to the power of modern consoles like PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Battlefront featured the most fully-realized take on Star Wars ever seen in a video game. Character models and ships were detailed in ways not previously possible, from scuffs on stormtrooper armor and scratched paint on snowspeeders to the cleft in Mark Hamill’s chin. There were ground battles and aerial combat exercises on planets from the original trilogy, The Force Awakens, and even on Sullust — a world only previously mentioned in The Empire Strikes Back and finally brought to life for the game. (Running side-by-side with an AT-AT on Hoth as it kicks up snow, just one of many great Battlefront moments, was something of a dream come true.) For the developers, however, there was still a feeling of missed opportunities and more work to do — which would ultimately shape Battlefront II.

“We were super proud of Battlefront,” says senior producer Orion Kellogg of the Lucasfilm games team. “It was great to bring the Battlefront franchise back to consoles and in HD. It just looked amazing and it really fulfilled a lot of Star Wars fantasies, but we knew we weren’t done. We knew that it was going to be a multi-game franchise, and we knew we wanted to bring, right off the bat, some of the things that the fans called out as missing from the first one.”

But first, they were determined to address the bantha in the room.

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