The Star Wars: Battlefront revival at DICE is ”going to take awhile,” having just announced it. Soderlund ”didn’t think they wanted” it at DICE because the IP wasn’t their own.
The Battlefield studio is looking closely at previous Star Wars games and that includes the scrapped Battlefront 3 that was in the works. Everything is available to them.
”The most important thing for me is that we take the Star Wars license and come up with games where peoples’ jaws drop,” said EA Games label man, Patrick Soderlund. They need to pull off their own Batman: Arkham Asylum to reignite Star Wars and get gamers excited to go back to Hoth trench lines again, he mused.
”It’s going to take awhile,” he said. ”We just announced the license and showed a sneak peek of Hoth. The speeder and the AT-AT will be in for sure.” The news of the license agreement wasn’t too long ago. Soderlund was honestly surprised that DICE approached him to work on Battlefront.
”I didn’t think they wanted to build it,” he said. ”I thought they only wanted their own IP. But it’s a really good fit.” DICE is currently developing Battlefield 4, its DLCs, Mirror’s Edge and now Star Wars: Battlefront.
”We didn’t toss anything out,” added Soderlund, referring to Battlefront 3. ”We’re looking at the old games. We have access to everything that was done during the LucasArts era. But we do want to take our own stance.”
DICE is building Star Wars: Battlefront using their proprietary Frostbite 3 engine, which has empowered the studio to let us knockdown whole skyscrapers in Battlefield 4 and seriously deform the environment.
