It was to be the most authentic Star Wars experience available at the time, pushing the ageing console hardware to its fullest in an effort to make use of new rendering, animation and artificial intelligence techniques and systems. It was designed as a predominantly online multiplayer experience, with a single-player mode included to help account not only for those that hated playing nicely with others, but for the occasionally unreliable Xbox Live servers of the era. It’s a shooter built around team strategy and synergy, one that would feature battles, worlds and characters from the first six Star Wars movies. But it’s here where Pandemic seemed to excel, revelling in the opportunity to deliver a game that could truly fulfil the Star Wars fantasy for fans of the prequel and original trilogy alike for the very first time.īattlefront began development in 2002 and, looking back at it today, it’s easy to appreciate the ambition that fuelled it.

Its largest scenarios build around obvious rails and banding, dictating the ebb and flow of its theme park battles so fervently that you never really feel as if you are making an impact among the mess of conflicts occurring elsewhere. It can have 40 players running around inside its faithfully recreated maps, but no real sense of escalating emergency or chaos. DICE may well have done a fantastic job in delivering the most overtly authentic version of the Star Wars universe in a video game – capturing the sights and sounds of the original trilogy in a way that had never before seemed plausible, let alone possible – but it failed to accurately convey the franchise’s most important commodity: its soul.ĭICE's more Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 have scale, but fail to generate any real friction between opposing forces ( despite all that loot box controversy).

Star wars battlefront 1