Star Wars: Battlefront - EA DICE CEO Discusses Challenges

In an interview with The Guardian, DICE CEO Patrick Soderlund discussed the challenges of creating Star Wars: Battlefront.

Soderlund said,

“We need to be humble! The idea of doing it is really cool, but then, it’s “uh-oh, how do we do this?” We have to treat the brand with respect but then put our personal flavor on it. That’s the only way that makes sense to us. I think we’re there now; the team knows exactly what it’s doing, and I can tell you that some of the things you’ll see … they’re mind-blowing. But it took a while, it was almost as though we did have to sit down and say, oh shit, how do we treat this with the respect that it deserves – and to be very blunt, how do we not screw it up?”

When asked how his got past that, Soderlund replied,

“Once you get familiar with that thought, you quickly have to move on and think, okay, how do we make this awesome? How are we going to make people love what we’ve done? That’s where we are right now. Another good thing is, we didn’t really know what it would be like to work with Disney and LucasFilm – Dice has never worked with a licensor before in that sense, we’ve always developed our own IPs. We didn’t know what to expect! But now we know them, we know they share our passion, they share a lot of the same views as we do – it has become a lot easier.”

“Now, we’re over the honeymoon period when everyone is nice to each other, we’re into production, but the relationship is getting stronger. The same aspiration is there to make something unique and not to follow some of the previous attempts to make great games from a movie license – attempts that failed. We think, how do we become what Warner Bros did with Batman? How do we become that iconic computer game that respects the license, that brings it forward? If we can do that we’ll be fine.”

When asked that it really has to be Dice’s version of Star Wars, just as GoldenEye was Rare’s version of James Bond and Arkham Asylum is Rocksteady’s vision of Batman, Soderlund responded,

“Yes, and I can tell you that’s been the spirit of the collaboration from day one. When Disney understood that Dice was going to develop this, they were like, “cool, do what you think, stay in touch.” So far it’s been very good. I’m very happy with how the team is working.”

You can also read how Soderlund discussed real time weather effects for Battlefield 4.

You can pre-order Star Wars: Battlefront from Amazon right now.

What did you think? Are you excited about the new Star Wars: Battlefront game?