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Star Wars Battlefront - Designer Diary #1
Greg Borrud, executive producer on SWB, details the genesis of the game and lists five important features that went into shaping it.
By GameSpy Staff | Feb. 27, 2004


Hello everyone! Welcome to the first in a series of designer diaries that will document our progress on a new game we're creating: Star Wars Battlefront. My name is Greg Borrud and I'm the executive producer on the game. Over the next couple of months we are going to be bringing you some pretty cool diaries which will give you insight into the progress of our game -- not just from my perspective, but from a number of people on the team including programmers, designers, artists, and sound designers. We hope to give a real behind-the-scenes look at our development process and track the progress of the team as we get closer and closer to shipping the game. But before I kick it off, let me give you a little background on how this game came to be.

We started working on Star Wars Battlefront here at Pandemic Studios in November of 2002. We established our goal for the game right away. We wanted to create an online shooter title for the Xbox, PS2, and PC which would allow for team strategy and would feature battles and worlds from every one of the six Star Wars films. The game would be the ultimate Star Wars fan's dream. It would allow you to do nearly everything and anything that you had seen in the movies, from fighting in the trenches on Hoth to manning a Republic Gunship on Geonosis.

Once we had a clear vision on what we wanted to create, we got together with the core team members and started to develop a comprehensive design document. This is always one of the more exciting times on a project, because at this point the sky is the limit. If you can dream it, we can at least consider it. All kinds of ideas got tossed around and a lot of them got tossed out -- but in the end we settled on a simple, yet elegant design which would give players what they wanted from this type of game, while at the same time introduce a number of new gameplay ideas which we hope will really catch on.

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In coming up with the design doc we also tried to establish what the game had to deliver. We wanted to make sure we always stayed on target. In the end, we narrowed our list of "must-do" features to the following.


1. The game must be balanced. We knew from a lot of our real-time strategy game development at Pandemic that balance is a critical part to making an online game that people play forever. We felt it was critical to get a build up and get going as soon as possible with all the units and features so we could have several months of tweaking and refining until we felt we had it just right.


2. The game should encourage team play. Although free-for-all shooters are fun -- we wanted to make sure Star Wars Battlefront rewarded those who played as a team. This shows up in our unit and vehicle design. There are even great examples of team play in the Star Wars movies. For example -- how do you take out an AT-AT? With a snow speeder. But as you'll remember in The Empire Strikes Back it takes two people to take down an AT-AT -- one to fly the speeder and another to shoot the tow cable. If we could get this kind of cooperation in our game we knew we would haven gotten it right.


3. The game should also be fun to play in single-player mode. We are building this game for the multiplayer crowd, but we also realize there are a lot of Star Wars fans out there who don't like multiplayer games. They still want the fantasy of fighting in the greatest battles in the galaxy. So we've come up with a number of cool and unique ideas for the single-player mode to make this a truly fun and rewarding experience for those people. Single-player gaming is usually an afterthought with online shooters, but we wanted to make sure we gave it the appropriate attention.


4. The game must fulfill the Star Wars fantasy. For every world we pick or battle we design we consult the films. We've literally watched them hundreds of times and are constantly thinking about what the key fantasies and visuals are that come from the movies. We want to capture each one of those in the game. All the big ground battles are there and we're putting in all the appropriate touches to make it feel as real and authentic as possible.


5. In this game you must be able to kill Ewoks and Gungans. Enough said!

There are a hundred other features in addition to these, and I'm sure we'll be covering them all in the upcoming months. In the end, however, we believe if we remain true to these five fundamentals we will have attained our goal and at the same time created a game that we can all be truly proud of.

I better get back to work. We'll be back in a month with another report from the battlefront.•

5. In this game you must be able to kill Ewoks and Gungans. Enough said!

Darth Phoenix wrote:Looks like i could be a awesome game

5. In this game you must be able to kill Ewoks and Gungans. Enough said!

Finally