Remember the little chipmunk-faced guy who helped Lando fly the Millennium Falcon in Return of the Jedi? He was a Sullustan—from the planet Sullust, as you might surmise—and his homeworld will be the setting for at least one of the 12 multiplayer maps included with Star Wars: Battlefront.
To accurately recreate the surface of Sullust, which according to the Wookiepedia is "composed of multicolored rock, veined by lava channels," members of the DICE development team headed to Iceland, "a unique and ideal location which in multiple areas looked like another planet," the studio wrote in a blog post detailing the experience. They took photos and video of the landscape, which Lead Environment Artist Andrew Hamilton said "hints at all the features in our concept [art] and all the content we needed to gather."
Even with the Icelandic footage, it was more work creating the in-game environment for Sullust than for other planets, like Tatooine, Hoth, and Endor, all of which had real-world counterparts seen in the films. Material collected from those locations "could be used right away," Senior Level Artist Petter Skold explained, but the studio had to "shift and bend" the footage from Iceland to fit the design.
"Everything needs to look like something you could actually imagine existing," Hamilton added. "That’s what we wanted to do with Sullust…make it feel out of this world but like it could actually exist."
EA said there will be 12 multiplayer maps of various sizes and shapes in Star Wars: Battlefront, some new and some familiar, and also teased "even more locations when you include the Star Wars Battlefront Missions." The capitalization makes it look like some kind of DLC, but I'm assuming it's actually a reference to the small-scale scenarios that will comprise the game's single-player/co-op mode.
Star Wars: Battlefront comes out on November 17. Find out what we're hoping it delivers, and see some video from the recent Star Wars Celebration, in the latest edition of the PC Gamer Show.
