Whilst speaking to the Creative Executive of Lucasfilm, Steve Blank and Game Director at Motive Studios, Mark Thompson, we wanted to know exactly how Battlefront II would tell an authentic Star Wars story that spanned 30 years.
More specifically, we learned that the Star Wars Battlefront II campaign will start at the end of Return of the Jedi and it will detail some pretty key events all the way up until just before The Force Awaken starts when the Starkiller base is created.
Speaking about the story moments that we can expect, Mark Thompson said “Whilst not every event in between these two movies will take place in the game, there’s definitely interesting moments events, some of which are established and some that are new to the Star Wars franchise that will be commit to building the authentic Star Wars stories”.
When speaking about the challenges in creating a story that spans such a long period, with some pretty important characters, Thompson said “That the challenge is making sure that everything is true to the characters. When you step into the shoes of Luke Skywalker, it’s about us as a team being true to the mechanics. Making sure that there’s consistency across playing as Luke Skywalker during the campaign and multiplayer, so you’re learning to play as that character. It’s also important that when we decide to have Luke in the story, we need to remember that Luke is a character between this moment in the game and after this moment in the game and we need to make sure that we’re writing a chapter that matches up with where he has come from and where he is going in the future.”
It’s clear that this story needs to fit in within the Star Wars universe. There’s obviously things that happen in this game that need to match up with events that’ll happen in The Last Jedi and beyond. Thompson spoke a little bit about the challenges involved with that.
“The story group knows more than we do about the Star Wars universe, so it’s hard building a moment in this universe when there’s so much in the future that we need to abide by” Thompson said.
Speaking the ideation period of Iden Versio’s story, Thompson said “We always knew we wanted to tell this story, and when we went to LucasFilm, we knew we wanted to tell this story from the soldier’s perspective and investigate the Imperial perspective. There was never another solid idea that we had for Battlefront II. Luckily they liked that theme, so we could focus in on the details and the events and who we included within the story”.
Star Wars: Battlefront II will release on November 17th for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
