Despite the Star Wars franchise’s name referencing, above all else, battles that take place in space, EA’s Star Wars Battlefront (2015) contained no actual space battles until its third expansion came out. This was one of the many criticisms the game had to face at launch.
However, according to a panel at Star Wars Celebration 2017, Star Wars Battlefront II will fill the space battle-sized hole in your heart, and space battles will be a substantial part of the multiplayer experience. The single-player campaign’s main character, Iden Versio, is a pilot, after all, so it only makes sense that dogfights will be important in multiplayer modes as well.
But this isn’t the only area we’ll see the game’s multiplayer expanding. This sounds like it’s actually going to be an incredibly robust, meaty experience.
We already knew we’d be getting content from all of the Star Wars eras we’ve seen on the big screen — prequels, original trilogy, and Disney’s current films — as opposed to sticking with a single era like the first Battlefront did. At the panel, fans were promised more weapons, more heroes, and more vehicles than we’d seen in the previous game.
In addition to just more stuff, we’ll also see the return of classes (something that Pandemic’s old Battlefront games included but were absent from EA’s 2015 game) and a more robust progression system. We don’t know what any of these classes are yet, but we were told they’d be familiar and “iconic to the Star Wars universe.”
These classes will feature some sort of progression that will allow players to unlock new abilities to upgrade their characters. This mindset will carry over to heroes and even vehicles, which will also include progressive unlock systems.
And, once again, we’ll see hero ships as well. The previous Battlefront game allowed players to enter a small selection of hero vehicles, like the Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett’s Slave I. With this new entry in the series, it sounds like there will be plenty more.
We also can expect to see a map set on Kamino, and Hoth will have rideable tauntauns. Oh, and eagle-eyed viewers of the full-length Battlefront II trailer may have noticed this quick little shot:
It seems to imply a return of fan-favorite battle spot, Mos Eisley.
All in all, this is an enormous amount of content, so it sounds like Battlefront II will be several times larger than its predecessor. The game launches worldwide on November 17, 2017, but there are two ways to play early. First, EA Access and Origin Access members will get to jump into their Play First Trial on November 9, and anyone who orders the epic Elite Trooper Deluxe Edition will get to start playing on November 14.
It definitely sounds like EA’s putting in the work to make this an incredibly packed multiplayer experience, and we can’t wait until we get to hop in this November.