Star Wars Battlefront will be released next month and a beta is scheduled for this Thursday, Oct. 8, but what about some of those inconsistencies in the canon of the Star Wars Universe?
In an interview with GameSpot, senior producer in charge of hero character design Jami Keen talked about what it was like to work with Lucasfilm and Disney when it came to issues of canon.
"Working with them, we put forward what we wanted to do gameplay wise, what I wanted to realize, and those sorts of things,” Keen said. “And Lucasfilm very quickly understood how much we felt for them as characters and how we wanted to treat them with the respect that they are due as such iconic figures in modern culture. It's actually been a really, really gratifying experience. I think it's something that, on both sides, we feel like we've been driving towards this shared goal."
Keen also spoke on how EA Dice approached the balancing of hero characters (e.g. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker) for a competitive multiplayer game with plenty of grunt-like characters on the field.
"We bounce back and forth, which is quite fun,” Keen said. “We have playtests over at DICE and run user tests and things like that. It's a very delicate balance because you need to think about the person that is playing as the character, but also the people that are fighting against them. This is kind of weirdly counter-intuitive, but if they are overpowered, that actually becomes more boring for the people that are playing as the Jedi character, than the people that are fighting against them. You think, 'That would be great. I can destroy everybody, and it would be amazing.' But when you get to that point–and we've misbalanced it sometimes and have given too much–people get bored. They go, 'I can just kill everybody. It's super boring.' Whereas everybody on the other side is like, 'No, we must defeat him.'”
Check out the full interview with Keen here.
Earlier today, new gameplay videos were posted containing footage of the upcoming beta.
