EA Sidelining ‘Battlefield’ for a “Couple of Years” in Favour of ‘Battlefront’

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EA saw tremendous success following the launch of Battlefield 1 in October. The WW1 setting of the game, which was initially disputed internally, provided the backdrop for a well executed, vignette style campaign and sprawling multiplayer experience (with a few creative liberties).

However, it seems the company is favouring the battlefields of a galaxy far, far away. EA’s chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, stated at the Nasdaq Investor Programme (via Videogamer) that we won’t be seeing a Battlefield game for “a couple of years.” The focus of the publisher instead is to have a new Star Wars Battlefront game out in the fall of 2017. Jorgensen spoke of a desire to address concerns that last year’s Battlefront was lacking in content.

“We were very excited about how Star Wars [Battlefront] came out last year,” he said. “It’s a beautiful game, people loved it. I think if there was criticism they just wanted more. And so we’re taking that criticism to heart as we build the next game and trying to address any of the issues that they had.

“We were really working with the old canvas of Star Wars, the old trilogy. Next year we’ll have the opportunity to leverage more of that content from the new movies and we think that’ll make the opportunity much larger.”

Despite some noteworthy expansions, the general consensus surrounding Battlefront was that there wasn’t much to it. Where it excelled in authentically capturing the aesthetic and sound of Star Wars, it failed as a longstanding multiplayer shooter. That particular issue could be addressed by including a single-player campaign, something sorely missing from the original. EA faced a similar situation with Titanfall, which benefited from having a single-player component in its sequel. Luckily for the Battlefront sequel, it won’t be sent out to die like Titanfall 2 thanks to it being, you know, a Star Wars game.

Image: EA