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Dec 02

Star Wars Battlefront: Beautiful Maps — But Do We Get Enough Of Them?

Star Wars Battlefront comes with 9 maps, according to EA. But the map situation is complicated. Not all maps are available for all game modes. There are only four world maps: Tatooine, Suluust, Hoth, Endor. There are also only four BIG maps, used in the big game modes: Walker Assault, Supremacy, and Fighter Squadron. Turning Point is likely to also be restricted to these big maps.

Of the nine smaller maps, six work for Drop Zone, one of the other popular modes. The other three are available in the smaller game modes, such as Cargo, Hero Hunt, and Heroes vs Villains. Blast falls in between these.

The Battle For Jakku adds two more maps, one of which is a big one suited for Walker Assault. That brings the number of big world maps up to five. That is, only 5 world maps for the game’s epic game modes.

The original Star Wars Battlefront (2005) and Battlefront II offered far more world maps to play on. The default play mode, conquest, is handled in the new Battlefront game with the Supremacy, and presumably Turning Point, with Walker Assault offering a variation on the theme which still needs a large, open world map in order to play.

So, what worlds are out there?
Hoth (included, ice wasteland)
Endor (included, forest)
Tatooine (Mos Eisley) (included, desert)

We get Suluust and Jakku for new worlds, which is a nice addition, for a total of five.

Dagobah (spooky swamp)
Felucia (exotic marsh)
Geonosis (wild plains and hills)
Kamino (high tech city and lab)
Kashyyyk (Wookies!, forest and village)
Mygeeto (frozen, crystalline city)
Naboo (fields and city)
Utapau (arid sinkholes)
Yavin 4 (jungle with ancient temples)
Rhen Var (ice city with ancient ruins)
Mustafar (industrial volcano)
That is 11 additional worlds drawing on the game’s past. Of them, though, three or four are pretty much tied to the Clone Wars period, but certainly are adaptable. If we got all 11, that would bring us up to 16 big world maps.

But wait! There are some smaller, interior map locations also potentially usable.

Corusant (Jedi Temple) — an interior fight in a very large structure
Death Star — interior corridor fight in a huge ship, could be big enough to bring vehicles in
Mos Eisley — city street fight on Tatooine, good for Heroes vs Villains and such
Jabba’s Palace — ancient fortress with dangerous traps. If we got the neutral Gomorran Guards as a threat too, it could be quite interesting
Polis Massa — research base on lifeless world
Tantive IV — the interior fight of Princess Leia’s ship
Bespin — fight among the platforms of the cloud city

7 additional iconic locations. 11 plus 7 is 18, which is more than the promised 16 maps for the DLCs. But there is room for additional free DLC content to allow these to see use in the game.

The maps in Battlefront are spectacular, especially for Star Wars fans. Scenes from the movies can be reproduced in near movie quality within the game. Having more worlds appear in the game would help fill this out.

But will we get them? The current crop of maps gives use 4 worlds and, effectively, 9 + 4 = 13 map layouts using them. The use of smaller map configurations with different details does offer variety, but doesn’t really solve the problem of the shortage of large world epic maps, for the bigger game modes. If we, instead, got two worlds per DLC, with two small and two large maps per world, that would leave us with a final count of only 5+8 = 13 large world maps — far fewer than the previous games, and much too small a count to really allow enough variety.

Now, depending on how they count maps, we could actually get a bit more than that number of SMALL maps. If there are two worlds per DLC, they could offer 4 small maps — two locations each — and still have two large maps. It still would leave the problem of not enough epic game mode maps to play, but at least the smaller game modes would have plenty of variety — 9+1+16 for 26 total small map locations.

Based on The Battle Of Jakku, we could potentially get 16 worlds, with both large and small maps for each.  A total of 32 new play areas, with some being subsets of the larger map.  A total of 11+32 for 43 in all, which would be nice.  As someone who likes the larger, epic maps, this would be ideal.  They could give us even more smaller maps, if they want to get in a few more special locations.

Of course, we could get those in the paid for DLC, plus three free worlds, and make up for that shortfall. We don’t know yet how much will be offered.

One thing which could be cool would be a space (asteroid and shipwreck/debris) map for the Fighter Squadron game mode. It is nice to fight over planets, but it would also be nice to have a scene set in space, just for the visuals.

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