With twelve days until release, EA and DICE have revealed a new treat for those anticipating Star Wars: Battlefront – an “interactive” tour of four of the game’s worlds.
Part of the appeal of Star Wars has always been the strangeness of its worlds. Designed to look and feel ever so similar to our own Earth, they always contain hints of things ever so slightly different from our own – the trees of Endor look like Earth trees, but they seem much taller, much more elaborate, much more orderly than ours. Hoth looks like Earth’s Antarctica, but the shape of the caves, the permanent feeling of the snow, gives it an otherworldly vibe – enough of one that you cannot help but want to explore it.
Which is what makes the idea behind EA and DICE’s newest marketing campaign for their upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront reboot so enticing – an interactive tour. Taking four of Star Wars: Battlefront’s worlds – Hoth, Endor, Tatooine, and an original planet built for the game, Sullust – and giving players the ability to explore them (or at least the playable areas therein) is a great move. It grants a sense of openness, and gives players the ability to get further lost in the feeling of Star Wars, one of the great strengths of the game’s incredibly popular multiplayer beta.
However, the term “interactive tour” must be taken with a grain of salt – the trailer above, showing people exploring the expanses of Star Wars: Battlefront’s maps, is slightly misleading. The actual interactive tour linked above is more like a traditional trailer with annotations added on – each exploration consists of a several minute long single-take shot of a battle happening on the planet, with predetermined stopping points. Those stopping points give you several pop-up options to give you a (very bare-bones) description of a gun, character, vehicle, or map detail – some of which repeat between different worlds, and occasionally on the same stopping point. Mildly disappointing, given what the trailer indicates.
The interactive tour also does not include potentially the most interesting element of Star Wars: Battlefront – Jakku. Included as DLC in pre-orders (to also be released to the public for free on December 8) as the Battle of Jakku, Jakku is the world at the center of the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The opportunity to explore that ahead of the highly anticipated film? Seems like a missed opportunity.
Star Wars: Battlefront releases on November 17 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.
