The Meaning of Battlefront - The Identity Crisis of a 22 Year Old Franchise
Posted on Oct 21st 2026 20:42:50, by SG-17 in Opinion, Articles
Star Wars Battlefront III, it is almost a mythic name at this point. For over 20 years many developers have labored and lost in pursuit of Star Wars Battlefront III. There have been numerous Battlefront games following Pandemic Studio's 2005 classic, Star Wars: Battlefront II. Rebellion's PlayStation Portable titles Renegade Squadron and Elite Squadron and EA DICE's reboot Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront II (note the lack of a colon) titles were loved and maligned to varying degrees. So far no studio has successfully produced a titular third Battlefront. Infamously, Free Radical's ambitious Star Wars: Battlefront III was canceled, leaked, and turned into a total conversion mod for Star Wars: Battlefront II.
Now, in the wake of the death of the once-beloved BioWare, we have confirmation that EA DICE and Respawn Entertainment are working on Star Wars Battlefront III. This raises two gnawing questions, "what should this Battlefront be?" and "what will this Battlefront be?". To answer the former question we must take a look back at Battlefront through the years.
Star Wars: Battlefront launched in September 2004 on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC and quickly became the best selling Star Wars game ever at the time. Pandemic Studios envisioned and delivered a game where you would play as the common soldier in the great armies of the Rebellion, Empire, Republic, or Confederacy and fight in the "greatest Star Wars battles any way you want". Heroes were present, but as bot controlled invincible hazards only. According to the original game design documents Pandemic did intend for Jedi to be playable but that did not come to fruition until the second game. Regardless Pandemic's vision for Battlefront was to make an accessible and in-depth Star Wars take on the then-new Battlefield 1942.
Large scale combined-arms battles on famous Star Wars battlefields where you can pick any class, hop in any vehicle, and "live the battles". That was the vision for Star Wars: Battlefront.
Star Wars: Battlefront was so successful that LucasArts tapped Pandemic to make a sequel in time for the DVD release of Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith. As a result Pandemic had less than 9 months to make Star Wars: Battlefront II. Building off of the first game Pandemic refined the class system and infantry combat, adding sprint and removing prone. Most of the new maps added to the game were smaller-scale designed for tight infantry combat. These changes (and the game having player-run dedicated servers on PS2 and PC) allowed Star Wars: Battlefront II to develop a competitive community that still play matches to this day. (See our main site for info.)
Pandemic did use those 9 months to create playable Hero characters, mainly Jedi, Sith, Bounty Hunters, and certain Smugglers. These heroes were powerful boons to whomever could earn them on the battlefield. To help counter their raw power they were limited to one per team, had constantly draining health that could only be replenished by getting kills, and could easily be insta-killed by a well placed detpack, rocket, mine, or a lucky vehicle. They were essentially glass cannons. Pandemic also created what they described as a party mode, Hero Assault, where two full teams of heroes and villains would duke it out on Mos Eisley. As anyone still playing Star Wars: Battlefront II online could tell you today, this was not a serious or well balanced mode. Decades of tweaking via mods have refined it into a serious competitive gladiator pit, but in its original state it was just something to goof off with. At the end of the day Star Wars: Battlefront II was still about playing combined-arms battles on famous Star Wars battlefields where you can pick any class, hop in any vehicle, and "live the battles".
So that was Pandemic's Star Wars: Battlefront series. A take on a Battlefield: Star Wars. Infantry and vehicle combat as just one soldier among many fighting the battles that decided the fate of a galaxy far, far away. Rebellion's PSP titles continued along a similar line, however they eschewed the traditional class system in favor of a fully customizable kit. In 2013 at E3 it was announced that DICE was working on a reboot of Star Wars Battlefront. Two years later in 2015 their first entry in the series, Star Wars Battlefront released. It dropped the class system in favor of open kits like the Rebellion games, there was no classic Conquest game mode, and it set using vehicles and heroes behind finding tokens floating on the map. That said, it was a visual and aural feast and the core movement and gunplay, where strafing while shooting and hip-fire were not penalized in any way, felt very reminiscent of the original games and would've provided a solid foundation if DICE's Star Wars Battlefront II did not go the way it did...
I'm only going to briefly mention the micro-transaction elephant in the room with the "Pride and Accomplishment" controversy surrounding DICE's 2017 game Star Wars Battlefront II. How it single-handedly attracted the attention of governments around the world to begin regulating lootboxes and began to reframe the conversation in the games industry around the function and form of micro-transactions, leading to the world today where by and large they have become only cosmetic. In terms of the game itself DICE decided to bring back a class system for Star Wars Battlefront II. DICE utilized the 4-class system that they have been using in Battlefield since 2006's Battlefield 2142. For a year and half after launch that is where the similarities to Battlefield ended. The Capital Supremacy update in March 2019 added a mode that was superficially similar to Conquest and Titan/Carrier Assault, in that command posts would be fought over to allow for boarding the enemy's ship to destroy it. This mode was a pale imitation of the modes that inspired it.
DICE also decided to add movement and hip-fire penalties for shooting, making the gunplay feel slower and more rigid than even the previous title, let alone the original games. As time went on the biggest point of contention between fans of Battlefront series emerged, Heroes. DICE began to heavily focus on heroes as the game's life went on, adding more and more, focusing much of the remaining development time on updating and balancing them, giving most of the 22 heroes and villains multiple different skins. Meanwhile infantry combat was barely touched. The default weapons for each class were left to languish, one new weapon per class was added in the three years that DICE supported the game, and the promised infantry combat overhaul never materialized. DICE's Star Wars Battlefront II became a hero shooter first and a Battlefield: Star Wars second, it had lost sight of the original vision behind the franchise, and coming from the development studio behind the series that inspired Pandemic in the first place, Battlefield, this was doubly disappointing.
If you could not tell by now I strongly believe that Star Wars Battlefront III should return focus to the soldier. Become the arcade Battlefield: Star Wars that Pandemic intended with the creation of the franchise. There can be heroes sure, but they should not by the main attraction. Let there be a class-based arcade combined-arms shooter with classic Conquest as the main mode. Let the original E3 2004 trailer for Star Wars: Battlefront become reality again.