We’ve Finally Seen A Campaign Mission From Star Wars: Battlefront II
EA Play’s press conference was packed with thirty minutes of Star Wars: Battlefront II multiplayer but lots of people wanted to see the campaign. We did. After that showcase ended, I sat down to watch a developer-guided runthrough of an early story mission. The 15 minute sequence was full of dogfights, stealth takedowns, and laser blasts. It seems good.
The previous Battlefront did not have a campaign. This one does. Just as 2005’s Battlefront II dropped players in the boots of Imperial stormtroopers, this latest version of the game focuses on the Empire. Players control Iden Versio, leader of an Imperial commando unit called Inferno Squadron. In the demo EA showed today, Iden was recalled to the planet Vardos following the destruction of the second Death Star at the end of Return of the Jedi. She receives orders from her father, an Imperial admiral, to put her squad together for a new mission. A strange envoy of the Emperor relays the late leader’s last commands via a helmet that bears his likeness on a holo-screen: carry out Operation Cinder, a plan to disrupt the Rebels in case of the Emperor’s demise.
“In multiplayer, you get to play as the Empire, and you don’t think of the Rebels as the good guys when you’re in that role,” game director Mark Thompson said of the decision to focus on an Imperial character. “We wanted to try a different voice, so we weren’t just retelling the movies.”
Focusing on the Empire shows them struggling to fight back against the Rebels. As Iden prepares for Operation Cinder, the shipyard she is stationed at is attacked by an overwhelming Rebel force. The first portion of this level took place in the cockpit of a TIE Fighter and tasked…