Star Wars Battlefront single-player campaign sacrificed to meet Force Awakens release

EA Studios EVP Patrick Soderlund has admitted that the publisher and developer EA DICE made a "conscious decision" to sacrifice a single player campaign for Star Wars Battlefront in an effort to ensure that the game was released to coincide with the cinematic release of The Force Awakens late last year.

During an investor call held on 17 May (via Eurogamer) Soderlund said: "We made [the choice] due to time and being able to launch the game side-by-side with the movie that came out to get the strongest possible impact."

Star Wars Battlefront was criticised for a lack of single player content when it was released last November, but there was still enough there to impress us and commercially the game has proven to be a resounding success. In May EA announced the game has sold over 14 million copies.

As part of EA's fiscal report, Soderlund revealed at the time that a sequel to Battlefront will be released "next year" – either the next calendar or financial year. This likely means a release alongside Lucasfilm's cinematic release of Episode 8 in December 2017.

Regarding Battlefront's overall success, Soderlund told investors: "I think the team created a really good game based on the premise that we had. I would say the game has done very well for us and reached a very different demographic than a traditional EA game. So from that perspective, it's a success. Are we happy with the 75 [Metacritic] rating? No. Is that something we're going to cure going forward? Absolutely."

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