Trivia / Star Wars: Battlefront

• Ascended Fanon: The methods that have been constantly brought up by fans for common infantry to kill Jedi (actually using fully automatic fire, shotguns, shooting them with something bigger than small arms, abandoning Mook Chivalry) are the most effective way to kill the generic Jedi in campaign mode. Even these might not be enough, which is why there's the merry tactic of switching to a heavy trooper, taking out a landmine, and smacking the Jedi in the face with it.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The Clone Trooper's "Watch those wrist rockets!" from the second game is sometimes misquoted as "Watch out for those wrist rockets!" And yes, it's used more frequently than you'd expect.
• Christmas Rushed: Battlefront 2 Classic was rushed to release in November 2005 in order to coincide with the video release of Revenge of the Sith, which led to a lot recycled maps, AI behavior problems, pathfinding oversights and bugs.
• Executive Meddling: The reason there wasn't a Battlefront III according to multiple sources.
  • Battlefront III was actually pitched by British developer Free Radical Design (best known for the TimeSplitters series) to LucasArts in 2006 with the pitch being loved by their management, who immediately green-lit it with promises that if the game was a success they would also develop the sequel. However, a corporate restructuring in LucasArts brought a new management that was not happy with the arrangement with Free Radical for still-unconfirmed reasons.
  • The new leadership at LucasArts wanted to cut costs and so decided to cancel any projects that had barely entered into pre-production that didn't have mainstream appeal. Also, they wanted to keep major projects in-house due to the new management not wanting to depend on second party/hired developers for their games.
  • While developing Battlefront III, Free Radical was also developing the game Haze for Ubisoft, which had a Troubled Production that affected the entire studio and the development of Battlefront III. Free Radical was forced to move everyone to finish Haze on time, a move that really angered LucasArts, whose management felt that Free Radical was using their money to fulfill their obligations to Ubisoft.
  • Following Haze's buggy launch and commercial failure, morale was low in Free Radical and Battlefront III was far from finished (by the time of its cancellation, the game was in BETA), leading to LucasArts cancelling the game without even announcing to the public that it was in development. Both sides ended up accusing each other for the game's untimely cancellation.
• Sequel Gap: DICE's Battlefront, the first official installment in the series in years (not counting spin-offs), came out in November 2015 - a decade after the release of Battlefront II.
• Streisand Effect: EA released an alpha for the 2015 game that was intended to be completely private. This backfired spectacularly when people uploaded footage of the game on various video websites, regardless of the NDA. More leaks popped up as soon as EA tried shutting existing leaks down. Luckily, the alpha was pretty solid, barring a few Good Bad Bugs.
• Vaporware: Battlefront III became this, in spite of both titles in the Battlefront series being the most financially successful Star Wars games made up until that point. Free Radical's Battlefront III was a mostly finished beta, but was cancelled after they ran out of funds and closed down.^note A number of former Free Radical staff members claimed that they were subjected to especially malicious Executive Meddling that effectively sabotaged the game, while a former Lucasarts staff member claimed that the game wasn't nearly as done as stated, and accused Free Radical of funneling resources meant for the game to their own internal projects. After Disney bought Star Wars and gave the game rights to Electronic Arts, they announced at E3 2013 that a new game in the series (simply titled Star Wars: Battlefront) was in production, being developed by Battlefield developer DICE. Early gameplay footage was revealed at E3 2014 and the game itself was released on November 17, 2015.
• What Could Have Been:
  • There was originally supposed to be a Battlefront III for the seventh generation, but it was sadly cancelled, and most of its assets were used for the 2009 game for PSP and Nintendo DS. Observe. They were also apparently far enough along to begin making concept art of Battlefront IV.
  • Cut dialogue lines from the second game indicate that Palpatine's Royal Guard and old Ben Kenobi were originally meant to be hero units in the game.

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