DICE is in charge of making Star Wars: Battlefront and this has made a lot of gamers a little nervous about how much of Battlefield will make the transition over into Battlefront. Well, DICE has confirmed that ironsights won't be making the leap from the modern military shooter to the spage-age, sci-fi action game.
Over on GamesRadar they picked out a few choice quotes from an interview OXM conducted with DICE's executive producer, Patrick Bach, who insisted that Star Wars: Battlefront would maintain some form of separation from the Battlefield series, stating...
There are no ironsights in Star Wars, on the ordinary blasters, .... You have scopes on some rifles, but there are no ironsights.We’re not taking into account what we’ve done before, because I think that would be disrespectful to the fans, and to what we’re trying to achieve here. A lot of the things you saw in the game have nothing to do with anything we’ve done before. Some features of course resemble [our other shooters], because we want to make the best possible shooter, but in general we’ve tried to do something completely unique.
I honestly don't know how to take that. One part of me was kind of hoping they would reuse what assets and technologies they could from Battlefield to make the design process quicker and more streamlined, which in turn could open up more of a focus on refining the Star Wars qualities of the game. Similar to how Blood Dragon reusing Far Cry 3 assets allowed them to nail down the themes and aesthetics instead of having to focus on building everything from scratch.
However, another part of me is kind of excited because a game that isn't recycling assets from Battlefield means that it's going to be something entirely different from the Battlefield experience. For now, it's really hard to gauge what direction DICE is going to go in with Star Wars: Battlefront because not having ironsights for the standard blasters means that the game may focus more run-and-gun hip-firing. I have no idea how well that's going to work out but it could be pretty cool.
Also, with a lack of ironsights this means that trying to shoot people off vehicles may be somewhat difficult, but that could also add a lot of flavor to the whole affair. The original Star Wars: Battlefront titles were very finely tuned so that vehicles played a very important role in the combat and were essential for securing victory.
We still haven't learned much about how the vehicles will be handled in Star Wars: Battlefront but I'm desperately hoping that the Frostbite 3 will be used to bring the many iconic transports and vehicles to life from Star Wars with a heavy focus on physics-based damage and destruction. That could add many layers to the gameplay if done correctly.
We're likely to see our first glimpse of the actual gameplay for Star Wars: Battlefront come E3, which takes place next month. In the meantime you can check out the latest issue of OXM to get the full scoop on DICE's highly anticipated game by subscribing or downloading the issue.
