Star Wars Battlefront was an undeniable success, the game has sold 14 million copies according to EA, but the game has had issues on the customer satisfaction front. A lot of those copies of Star Wars Battlefront have since been returned to GameStop shelves, largely because of the game’s lack of single player modes.
During EA’s annual investor’s day, the company’s executive vice president Patrick Soderlund admitted shipping Star Wars Battlefront without a significant single player campaign was a “conscious decision,” and explained why it was made…
“Star Wars, I think is a game where you have to look at it from a slightly different perspective. Yes, we know that the one thing that we got criticized for was the lack of a single player campaign in it. It was a conscious decision that we made due to time, and being able to launch the game side by side with [Star Wars: The Force Awakens] to get the strongest possible impact. Are we happy with the 75 Metacritic rating? No. Is that something that we’re going to cure going forward? Absolutely.”
Soderlund didn’t spell out exactly how they plan to improve the recently-announced Star Wars Battlefront 2, but he did acknowledge that single player was important to shooters, and strongly implied they’ll be beefing up that aspect of the Battlefront sequel.
“In regards to the depth and breadth question, what we learned over the years, is that certain games and certain genres have different requirements for depth and breadth if you want to reach the maximum audience.
The shooter category as an example, we know to be true that in order for a game to truly break out and become really large, you most likely need both a single player campaign where the player can get familiar with the game and practice playing the game, to then hop on and play online.”
In other words, “John Boyega himself called us out about Battlefront not having a single player campaign, so the sequel is definitely going to have one.” Hopefully Star Wars Battlefront 2 delivers on the first game’s promise.
(via DualShockers)