Star Wars Battlefront was a beautiful game, there’s no doubt about that. The graphics and sound design were superb, and I would even go as far as saying it was possibly the most immersive game in the Star Wars universe so far. With its’ looks and sounds stripped away, the game was fundamentally ‘flawed’, in that it was severely lacking any kind of content.

Very few maps, very few game modes, no real single-player and subsequent DLCs than did little but further split a shrinking player base. However, EA has seemingly learnt form the mistakes of the first game and hopefully getting excited now won’t prove to be a terrible decision when the game is released in November 2017.

Fully Fledged Single-Player

One of the most exciting welcome additions is a fully-fledged single-player campaign in which we will be playing as Iden Versio, the leader of ‘Inferno Squad’, and following her across the entire Star Wars galaxy. Will it be better than the classic 501st campaign? No idea. Will it be better than the pitiful single-player component we were offered in 2015’s Battlefront? Absolutely.

A particularly exciting prospect is the fact that this campaign will be being played through the eyes of who are typically the ‘villains’ in the Star Wars universe. Most Star Wars stories opt to view the story through the lens of the rebellion, but Mark Thompson, game director at EA’s Motive Studios, said “We wanted to give the Empire heroes in that same way,” further explaining “We settled on this idea of telling a story from the Imperial perspective. The idea of special forces soldiers gave us this chance to become a new hero.” This is reminiscent of the original Battlefront II’s 501st campaign, which certainly isn’t a bad thing.

The Setting

The campaign itself takes place after the destruction of the second Death Star, and we see a new perspective of the Empire’s men mourning their loss when previously the perspective we had seen was one of celebration. With this setting we will hopefully see much more of the universe, and how it became to be the one we see in the current Star Wars movie trilogy.

This setting will hopefully present a new and exciting story, and supposedly spans a period of 30 years which means the gap between the ending we see in Return of The Jedi and the start of The Force Awakens will certainly be bridged in some way.

Multiple Eras

A big criticism regarding Battlefront II was its lack of Clone Wars content. A much as people tend to hate on the prequel movies, the Clone Wars was still sorely missed when it wasn’t included in Battlefront and Battlefront II will be rectifying that. We have already seen immense amounts of footage and gameplay from the prequel era, which has already made the game seem much more impressive than it’s rather limited predecessor.

Along with the varied vehicles having different eras offers, it also means the game will include the original trilogy planets along with the prequel era favourites such as Naboo, Geonosis and Kamino right alongside them. Arguably the most important part of this is the fact that it will allow for an expanded roster of heroes and villains to play as, such as Darth Maul and Yoda.

No Paid DLC

The original Battlefront suffered significantly from a split player-base once it’s DLCs introduced new maps, this seems unlikely to be a problem with Battlefront II as EA have committed to providing all DLC for free. While this does mean EA is aiming to receive most of their money from microtransactions within the game, it will at least prevent a problem that the original game suffered heavily from.

Overall, while there are many reasons to be sceptical of how Battlefront II will perform and whether it will really be a game worth buying. It does seem that it will, at the very least, outshine it’s predecessor in its scope.