Star Wars: Battlefront is a thing I'm rather excited about, and that's despite me not being a huge fan of multiplayer shooters, galaxies that at one time have harboured Jar Jar Binks, or games where I'm required to be any good. The previous Battlefronts were so enormous that I could happily do my own thing as a battle Ewok or something, contributing to the larger fight without feeling pressured that I had to bring my A-game. I have high hopes for DICE's reboo-quel, in other words, and a new interview on IGN conducted with Battlefront Design Director Niklas Fegraeus hasn't lowered my expectations a jot.
Leading with a new piece of concept art (you can find that below), the real meat of the article comprises a few choice quotes from Fergraeus, including this one:
“We have actually made the decision to specifically tailor certain maps to certain game modes, and what we get from that is not only incredibly varied scales, but also gameplay that will allow players to live out some of their most memorable Star Wars battle fantasies.”
Fergraeus promises "great variety" in the scale of Battlefront's maps and modes—for instance, snowy, AT-AT-riddled Hoth will be bigger than the more densely packed forest of Endor. Reading between the lines, I don't imagine we're going to be spending much time in Hoth trekking around on foot.
It's this kind of disparity between maps that's always appealed to me in the Battlefront series, so it's reassuring to hear that this philosophy appears to have carried over to the new game. Size aside, maps should also be pretty fancy looking, thanks to a process called 'photogrammetry'. I'll spare you the Google search—photogrammetry is a clever way to use photographs for environmental texturing, and it's how the developers of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter made such a damned beautiful game last year.
Battlefront should be with us "holiday 2015", and this behind the scenes video is really all we had to go on until this point.
