‘Star Wars: Battlefront’ Will Have Co-Op And 60 FPS, But No Campaign Or Space Battles

As the Star Wars: Battlefront information dump continues to roll out following Friday’s reveal, more details emerged about the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC shooter. Some of it may be disappointing to fans hoping for a campaign experience and space battles, but there are some other interesting tidbits that may make up for their absence.

Unlike previous titles in the Battlefront series, there will not be a single-player campaign. In its place, developer DICE will offer a series of missions that can be played either solo or cooperatively. Co-op isn’t limited to just online though. The game will support split-screen local co-op in a welcome break from the current trend of little-to-no local co-op play with the PS4 and Xbox One.

“I would say they occupy that space…where you play alone,” General Manager of DICE Patrick Bach told IGN. “Or you can play co-op, split screen or on the internet. The game is first and foremost a multiplayer game. Battlefront was a multiplayer game. That’s the game we wanted to create — to recreate the battles of the Original Trilogy.”

DICE isn’t getting into the specifics of these missions yet, so it’s unclear if they are survival based or objective based. Bach did say that the missions are “connected,” however, and “quite different” from the regular multiplayer.

Design Director Niklas Fegraeus added some additional flavor in a Twitter Q&A session that revealed bots will be in play as well.

We have a feature called Missions that allow you to play solo or cooperatively with bots on or offline https://t.co/v7IL7fuC8G

— Niklas Fegraeus (@DICEfigge) April 17, 2015

The action in Star Wars: Battlefront will be limited only to on-planet encounters though. DICE confirmed that there will not be any battles in space like there were in Battlefront II, making it more like the original Battlefront.

“In our game, we want to bring the fantasy of dogfighting to players,” she said. “We bring you the X-Wing, and we bring you the TIE Fighter, and other air vehicles that you want to fly in and experience, but we keep them on the planet’s surface,” Senior Producer Sigurlina Ingvarsdottir told Game Informer.

DICE hasn’t gone into detail on how players will be able to get into vehicles though. Ingvarsdottir hinted that it will be through power-ups, but exactly how is not clear.

Interestingly, we have various outlets confirming that DICE is aiming for 60 frames per second (fps) with Star Wars: Battlefront. While PC gamers shouldn’t have a problem running the game at 1080p and 60 fps, it will be interesting to see what happens with the PS4 and Xbox One. Both Battlefield 4 and Hardline could only manage 900p and 720p respectively on both consoles.

“We’re making sure, first and foremost, to ensure it runs at 60 frames per second on everything because that’s what delivers the best gameplay experience,” Producer Craig McLeod informed Stevivor.

Limiting the number of players to a max of 40 may help, but we’ll have to wait to find out if DICE has made optimizations to the Frostbite 3 engine to ensure both consoles can handle higher resolutions.

What do you think of what has been revealed of Star Wars: Battlefront so far? Sound off in the comments below.

[Images via Star Wars: Battlefront]