Battlefront is going to look stunning, and this game is potentially the main Star Wars sandbox we’ll be playing in for the next several years. But I especially want to see those worlds rendered in DICE’s powerful engine. I want to play on a rich variety of Star Wars planets, as different Star Wars aliens. This point goes hand-in-hand with the last one. The ones that keep players for years and years give them a good reason to stay. Without a reason to stay, gamers will often play a new shooter only until the next one comes out, and then jump ship. Despite selling more than 7 million copies across PC and consoles, DICE’s Battlefield 4 now has a peak player count of less than 25,000 on PC, according to BF4Stats. After just two months, Evolve has slipped off Steam’s most-played list, and Steam Charts shows it current peak player count at a mere 1300. Today there are more than 500 shooters on Steam, and every new game has to face that competition. And, of course, Star Wars: Battlefront 2. And there were plenty of other shooters, with smaller but dedicated player bases, like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Counter-Strike: Source had split the community in two. Call of Duty 2 was just beginning the series’ meteoric rise to popularity, but its multiplayer domination was still a few years off. Unreal Tournament 2004 was still going strong. Battlefield 2 was brand new, replacing 2002’s Battlefield 1942. Let’s travel back, for a moment, to the multiplayer shooter scene of 2005. It would also give Battlefront a leg up over the crowded field of competitive shooters on PC, lending it something vital more and more shooters are failing to achieve: staying power.
Robust mod support for the new Battlefront wouldn’t just be an amazing opportunity for Star Wars fans to expand on a game they’ve been anticipating for nearly a decade.