Battlefield 1 is doing pretty well for Electronic Arts—so well, in fact, that you're not going to see another one for a good while to come. EA "won't have another Battlefield back for a couple of years," CFO Blake Jorgensen said at the Nasdaq 35th Investor Program, as reported by Videogamer.com. "Next year we'll have Battlefront, the Star Wars game."
The new Star Wars Battlefront will be "much bigger" and "more exciting" than last year's edition, and will focus on the new movies, something the current game won't do until the release of the Rogue One: Scarif DLC on December 6.
"We were really working with the old canvas of Star Wars, the old trilogy. We weren't using any of the new materials that came out of [Episode 8] because our game actually came out slightly before the movie," Jorgensen said. "Next year we'll have the opportunity to leverage more of that content from the new movies and we think that'll make the opportunity much larger."
EA also aims to address the shortcomings of the Battlefront reboot with the sequel, although it doesn't sound like Jorgensen thinks there's much to worry about in that regard. "It's a beautiful game, people loved it. I think if there was criticism [it was that] they just wanted more," he said. "And so we're taking that criticism to heart as we build the next game and trying to address any of the issues that they had."
Despite its success, I don't know if anyone really expected a new Battlefield game to come out next year anyway. Battlefield 4, Hardline, and 1 were released in consecutive years, but the relatively muted response to Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and the critical hit Titanfall 2 is a clear indication of gamer fatigue, and that has to be at least partly the result of the sheer glut of shooters crowding the market. Taking a break is probably a good idea—absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 doesn't have a hard release date yet, but EA said earlier this year that it will be out sometime in 2017.
