Star Wars: Battlefront made a splash by recreating locations, characters, and moments from the original movie trilogy, but the final piece of DLC will focus on a new film: Rogue One. Design director Niklas Fegraeus announced the news at a gaming panel during the Star Wars Celebration expo in London, speaking alongside other designers for titles that EA is publishing with Lucasfilm.
It's been known for some time that Battlefront would have four different DLC packs, with the first two focusing on the Outer Rim — think Jabba the Hutt's palace — and Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back. The third, due in the third quarter of this year, will be centered around the Death Star, and will let players take on the roles of both Chewbacca and the reptilian bounty hunter Bossk. The content of the final installment had been a bit of a mystery, but its holiday release makes perfect sense as a tie-in to Rogue One. In it, players will be able to visit the beachy planet of Scarif, as seen in the sizzle reel released yesterday. As far as hero characters, players will be able to take on the two biggest roles: Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), or Ben Mendelsohn's Director Krennic.
Visceral's untitled Star Wars game is coming in 2018
During the panel Uncharted director Amy Hennig also spoke briefly about the untitled project she's working on with Dead Space studio Visceral Games. Hennig and her team have been working closely with the Lucasfilm Story Group to ensure the film remains authentic to the world, with artist Doug Chiang (The Force Awakens, Attack of the Clones) serving as de facto art director for the project. The creative process, Hennig said, has been very similar to what she employed while working on Uncharted: she went back to the original Star Wars films to deconstruct how they worked in terms of tone, action, and story turns, and has used that as a framework to design the game. "The end goal with a game like that is by the time the player has finished playing the game, they feel like they really played a Star Wars film," she said.
Other details were kept tightly under wraps, but judging from the discussion and images shown a few things seem clear. It obviously appears to be some sort of action game, and judging from the design of the Stormtroopers it appears to take place sometime before the Rebel Alliance broke the Empire's grip on the galaxy. Also important to it feeling like a Star Wars movie, said Hennig, was that it be an ensemble piece — a departure from the Nathan Drake-centric Uncharted games. Visceral will likely go silent after Celebration, she said, but hopes to be showing off footage from the game — ahead of its 2018 release — next year.