Unless you’ve been living under a rock in the Tatooine desert, EA and DICE recently announced a sequel to 2015’s Star Wars Battlefront.
The original was a game that showed huge promise, but left many feeling disappointed thanks to a lack of key features, like a solid campaign, local multiplayer, and actual space battles (seriously, a Star Wars game with no space battles? Lame).
We already know that DICE (along with Criterion and Motive) are introducing a focused single player campaign, space battles, and all of the big stuff we were hoping for – here are five more things that would make Battlefront II a worthy sequel.
Reworked Vehicles
One of my favourite aspects of Battlefront was the ability to leap into various vehicles, AT-AT or AT-ST and really cause some carnage, racking up as many kills as you could before going out in a blaze of glory.
Getting hold of one of these vehicles would require you to grab a token which would spawn at various points on the map – the obvious problem here being that as soon as a token spawned, half of your team would make a mad dash towards it, forgetting about the objective in a bid to be the one who claimed the prize – not exactly conductive to good teamwork.
DICE could reduce the inter-team scramble for these vehicles by removing the tokens entirely, perhaps replacing with a system that lets everybody spawn into a set vehicle once per game, or else has some kind of cooldown to keep things balanced.
Galactic Conquest
Anybody that played the original Battlefront games during the glorious days of the PS2 will know what Galactic Conquest is, and it’ll no doubt be at the top of most wishlists for the new game.
Galactic Conquest was a brilliant single-player mode in which you – as the name implies – had you slowly take on opposing factions until you conquered the entire galaxy, which planets rewarding you with new soldiers, weapons, and gear depending on whether you attacked or defended.
We know we’re getting a campaign, but if DICE really want to beef up the solo experience, then they need to bring back Galactic Conquest as an additional mode, and maybe throw in the option to play online with mates too.
Seamless Space Battles
Battlefront (2015) did a good job of incorporating seamless transitions between infantry combat and vehicular mayhem, but I think it can be taken even further by working in the proper space battles that we’re all desperate for.
As Rogue One proved, it can be pretty fucking cool to see an epic space battle kicking off at the same time as a ground skirmish – so how about games where the team on the ground is reliant on a space-bound team completing set objectives, and vice versa?
Just imagine hovering around the Death Star, fighting off imperial ships while you wait a team inside to lower the shields, allowing you to swoop in and blow shit up… there’s potential there.
Simmer Down On The DLC
Safe to say, the general consensus around the DLC for Battlefront was that it wasn’t handled well at all (and that’s putting it mildly).
The good news is that we’ve been told Battlefront II (probably) won’t have a Season Pass, but will have ‘something different’. While we all ponder what that means, and whether or not it’ll end being a good thing in the long wrong, we can take comfort in the fact that EA and DICE don’t want to fragment the community this time around.
Could we get nothing but free content, similiar to Titanfall 2 (also published by EA)? We can dream, but I doubt it for an IP as massive as Star Wars.
Plus, we already know that Battlefront II will have a preorder bonus that ties-in to The Last Jedi movie, because it’s 2017 and it’s against the law not to have preorder incentives.
Modular Maps
One of my own personal problems with Battlefront was that DICE tailored specific maps for specific modes. While this didn’t exactly ruin the game, it did somewhat limit the variety when the only times we could see Hoth was during a 40-man supremacy or Walker Assault.
The DLC for the 2015 game addressed this issue, slicing larger maps into smaller sections for select modes, which greatly bolstered the available maps, giving players more options.
Battlefront II should do this from the beginning, and if DICE really want to keep us happy, then the odd free map update wouldn’t hurt either. Keep things fresh, and all that.
Battlefront II has a hell of a lot to live up to if it wants to come close to the greatness of its namesake, but I think all the pieces are in place for a genuinely fresh FPS – EA just need to take their time and make sure they get it right.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.