In the latest Star Wars: Battlefront 2 content roadmap, DICE revealed a detailed look at what’s to come for the remainder of 2019, and to no surprise, brand new movie tie-in content for The Rise of Skywalker will be releasing at some point in December. Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is due to receive its first December updated in the first week of the month with a second coming later on that is expected to correlate with the release of The Rise of Skywalker which is due to hit theatres worldwide on December 20. So, what can fans expect from Star Wars: Episode IX?
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The first Star Wars: Battlefront, which is technically the second game with the name Star Wars: Battlefront and the first of the rebooted series, released in November 2015, ahead of the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens - the first Star Wars film to be released following Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm. In an effort to recapture the magic of the franchise, EA and DICE chose to focus purely on the original trilogy of films, meaning that there was no big tie-in for The Force Awakens, only a small update called The Battle of Jakku which added two maps and a new game mode for an event set between the original and sequel trilogies.
With two years between the mainline films of the new trilogy, Disney released its first Star Wars spin-off movie called Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Star Wars: Battlefront released with a Season Pass for post-release content and its fourth and final map pack, Rogue One: Scarif was the first proper movie tie-in for the series. The Rogue One DLC came out one week before the film and featured four brand new maps based on the film, a new game mode, two weapons, two vehicles, a new Star Card, and two new playable heroes in the form of Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso and Ben Mendelsohn’s Director Krennic.
For Star Wars: Battlefront 2, DLC worked a little differently after EA removed Season Passes from all its upcoming games, opting for free content updates and microtransactions instead. Battlefront 2 released in November 2017, one month ahead of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and released a six-week season of content around the new film. The Last Jedi season of content included three new campaign missions in the form of Resurrection, two new maps, and three playable heroes: John Boyega’s Finn, Gwendoline Christie’s Captain Phasma, and Tallie Lintra RZ-2 A-Wing hero ship.
The final movie tie-in came with the release of Disney’s second Star Wars spin-off, Solo: A Star Wars Story. Releasing at the end of May 2018, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 received its second seasonal event called The Han Solo Season, with new content added to the game over a six-week period. The first Han Solo updated added the Hero Showdown mode, Starfighter Arcade, a new Jabba’s Palace map, and two new appearances for Leia Organa and Lando Calrissian, while the second update added the Coaxium Mine map, the Extraction game mode, the Millennium Falcon hero ship, and three new skins based on the film for Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, and Chewbacca.
So, what kind of content can fans expect to see from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and will this launch a new seasonal event for Star Wars: Battlefront 2? Based on all of the previous movie tie-ins, the second December update is likely to drop at least one week before the release of the film and span across multiple weeks as DICE’s Community Manager, Ben Walke has publically said that December will a celebration month which is being headlined by The Rise of Skywalker. Here’s what DICE said in the latest roadmap:
Unfortunately, neither EA or DICE has mentioned anything about additional story missions since the release of Resurrection in December 2017 and a new co-op mode was released in September this year for The Clone Wars. This means that the majority, if not all of the new content will be strictly for multiplayer. It’s likely there will be between 2-4 new maps across multiple game modes, new hero appearances such as Dark Rey and Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, and new hero ships. If we’re going out on a limb, it’s possible that new weapons could be added as well considering that none of the prior releases had any and there’s a significant time jump between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker.
We are super excited that content around Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is coming to the game! We aren’t prepared to dig in deeper than that right now, but will unleash further details around this as soon as we can.
Also, more additional fall content and features are still to being confirmed, but we wanted to give you this an advance look into what’s coming up, even while realizing that things might move around, be added, or changed.
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Star Wars: Battlefront 3 isn’t happening anytime soon, so DICE and EA need to take this opportunity to really knock it out of the park and show lapsed players that now is the time to jump back into Star Wars: Battlefront 2. There hasn’t been a new Star Wars movie in the last 18 months, and yet Battlefront 2 has only continued to get better and better, meaning the release of The Rise of Skywalker could help bring all three trilogies full circle and make it the complete, definitive package that fans always wanted.
The end of the Skywalker Saga is out next month, Disney Plus is about to release in the US with a brand new live-action Star Wars TV show called The Mandalorian, and the single-player only, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is less than a week away. Right now is the perfect time to capitalize on the Star Wars brand and bring new and lapsed players in.
Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
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