Studio really, really wanted to work on the property
One would think that Electronic Arts would immediately offerStar Wars: Battlefrontto Battlefieldstudio DICE, but according to a CVG interview with EA Games Label executive VP Patrick Söderlund, “It was just something as boring as resources and availability.The DICE guys Karl Magnus Troedsson and Patrick Bach were talking and I told them we were in dialogues with Disney over this deal and they just looked at me and said, ‘Why haven’t you spoken to us? What are you doing? We want to make Battlefront.’”
Söderlund says he “didn’t anticipate them wanting to work on a license — they’ve always been new IP or their own IP. But they were just like, ‘we would kill to make this game’ and the whole studio started talking about it like, ‘please give us this game.’That’s when I called Frank [Gibeau, EA Labels boss] and I realized we had something here. ‘If they want it that badly, then the game will be freaking awesome — we have to figure it out.’ So we figured it out, we got them the game and it was that simple. They begged to do it, the opportunity was there and that’s exactly why you’ll see a game that will be what it needs to be.”
We have little in the way of specifics to go on for this particular installment, but, wow — the potential here is enormous. “You will have people that have worked on Battlefield for many years on it, you will have Patrick himself involved in it,” said Söderlund. “These are experienced DICE people in Sweden building this game – it’s being built in Stockholm.When it comes to the actual game, the approach we’re going to take is it’s a rebirth of the brand, it is Star War: Battlefront done the DICE way.”
INTERVIEW: EA’S PATRICK SÖDERLUND [CVG]