The first look at ‘Star Wars Battlefront,’ a familiar multiplayer feast

With a new film on the horizon, there’s a wave of excitement attached to the Star Wars franchise that hasn’t been felt since the months leading up to the release of Episode I. Part of Disney’s new plan for the $4 billion series includes a slate of new video game experiences over the course of a 10-year partnership with Electronic Arts.

At Star Wars Celebration, the 10th official convention focused on the iconic property, EA’s DICE studio showcased the first game in its decade-long plan: Star Wars: Battlefront, set to launch on November 17, 2015, for PC, Xbox One and PS4.

Powered by EA’s Frostbite engine, Star Wars: Battlefront brings large-scale, multiplayer-focused battles back to gamers for the first time since the series disappeared after Star Wars: Battlefront 2 launched in 2004.

The Star Wars Celebration-exclusive sneak peek of in-game Battlefront action begins on familiar land. The war-torn forests of Endor appear peaceful before a trio of speeders rips through the landscape. More stormtroopers emerge and the Rebel soldier we’re following begins to fire. A ripple of familiarity shoots through my spine: The combination of the game’s look and sound, even in its pre-alpha state with footage captured from a gameplay session on PlayStation 4, is authentically Star Wars.

To create a consistent look, Star Wars: Battlefront models have been developed with the use of a technique called Photogrammetry, recreating the actual models from the film franchise. With unprecedented access to the LuscasFilm archive, DICE was able to assemble digital facsimiles of original props for in-game models, rather than render replicas.

“When you pick up a lightsaber, or hop into a vehicle, you are picking up the lightsaber. It’s the actual X-Wing you’re [flying],” Battlefront Design Director Niklas Fegraeus says.

“We’ve seen attempts at this before, but they have never felt really like the movies,” DICE Stockholm GM, Patrick Bach, tells Engadget. “That’s the challenge we had and the relationship with LucasFilm on actually re-creating the events that you saw in the movies — scanning the elements of the movie and getting that into your virtual world.”

“Who doesn’t want to get onto Hoth and experience that fight?” Bach asks.

The soldiers on Endor continue their defense, thinning the lines of Imperial troopers, but an All Terrain Scout Transport (AT-ST) appears through the trees and cuts celebrations short. The AT-ST tears up the Rebel Alliance until a soldier boosts into the air with a jetpack and fires a missile at its head, destroying it.

Though authenticity is key for DICE, both as developers and fans of the film franchise, the team says there’s one crucial ingredient required: fun.

“[Fun] is the very essence of Star Wars,” Fegraeus says; a world of epic battles, good versus evil, heroes and imagination. Fun also means lighthearted, which Bach says helps drive the direction of a battle’s effect on the environment. While DICE games are better known for colossal destruction, Star Wars requires a softer touch.

“Star Wars, as an [intellectual property], is shaping what we’re doing. So we won’t do excessive destruction just because we can. It’s more about ‘what do you need and what you want’ in a Battlefield game versus a Battlefront game,” Bach says, adding that environmental anarchy in Battlefront wouldn’t be authentic to the franchise’s sensibility.

There still exists a sense of dread in Battlefront, however. The crunching sound of an All Terrain Armored Transport (AT-AT) Walker approaching sends our Rebel soldier and allies rushing toward cover. The thunderous sound of its four powerful, metal legs entering combat is immediately recognizable. There’s a reason for that, Fegraeus admits, the sounds featured in Battlefront come directly from the archives at LucasFilm. There’s a sense of strategy with all that you hear. Closing my eyes, I can identify the weapons and enemies that litter the battlefield. That immediate familiarity with what is on the horizon is unique to a series like Star Wars. A blaster is unique from a saber; an AT-ST and AT-AT sound different; a speeder in the distance is immediately identified thanks to its audible signature.

DICE takes things further with Battlefront being the first game to feature Dolby ATMOS support, technology that simulates audio within a 3D space for a more detailed aural experience. (ATMOS support was only announced for PC.)

Making the experience unique is important, Fegraeus says, and players will be able to customize gear, weapons and abilities. They can customize their gameplay style, playing in franchise-classic third-person mode or in first-person and switching on the fly. In addition to a progression system DICE isn’t revealing yet, players can uncover special power-ups by exploring the world, giving teams access to special vehicles, such as X-Wings and Walkers; or abilities, like shields or massive explosives and more.

While DICE says Star Wars: Battlefront is a multiplayer experience “first and foremost,” the game will feature content for offline fans. Star Wars: Battlefront Missions is a series of crafted challenges inspired by the films and available for solo play, or in local and online co-op.

DICE wants players to focus on creating an experience that is fun to share with friends. Battlefront‘s Partner feature is core to this idea: Once a friend is invited to be a partner, you become a tag team that plays together, spawns together and can even share unlocks with each other. Have a friend lagging behind in progression? This feature helps bring you closer.

Back on Endor, our Rebel escapes into an underground bunker with a friend. The halls are quiet as the pair explores the structure until our Rebel’s ally is captured within the clutches of a Force Choke and thrown against a wall. Our Rebel Soldier swings his blaster around the corner and opens fire. The menacing Darth Vader swipes away blaster fire with ease, his imposing figure inching toward the Rebel before taking a fierce swipe of his saber at our tour guide, ending the demo.

Iconic franchise characters like Vader will make an appearance throughout battle, available for players to uncover as special power-ups. While Bach wasn’t prepared to disclose exactly how character power-ups work, he was willing to share what DICE wants to avoid.

“The goal is, of course, to avoid exactly those situations where you race to a point and do bad things because you’re greedy,” Bach says, referring to the rush often seen in games of Battlefield as every soldier races toward vehicles or waits for them to spawn within the world. “We’re trying to design around behavior like that.”

Disney’s investment may well be tested prior to the film’s December 18, 2015, release, with Star Wars: Battlefront launching for PC, Xbox One and PS4 on November 17. Linking the upcoming game to what could arguably be the most anticipated movie of the year is free downloadable content. The Battle of Jakku, a key location from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, will premiere in Star Wars: Battlefront on December 8. Pre-ordering the game will give players early-access to the content, on December 1.

EA’s partnership with LucasFilm is “not a normal licensing relationship,” LucasFilm VP of Digital Business, Ada Duan, promises. The hope, according to Battlefront Design Director Niklas Fegraeus, is it will lead to “the best Star Wars games ever.” At the very least, it’s another element to one of the most exciting years in recent franchise history.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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OptiShot2 is a fun golf sim that also improves your game

If you have creeping doubts about your golf game, there’s a $500 sim that lets you swing real clubs in your house. Yep, your pets and furniture will need to make way for the OptiShot2, which gives you online play, simulated championship courses and instant practice feedback. You hook it up to a Mac or PC, download the software and swing away. The infrared sensors accurately track your swing while the simulated courses and online competition add a gaming-like fun factor. But $500 is a lot of money for a video game and sensor, so I want more than just fun; I also want to get better. Luckily, the OptiShot delivers both of those things.

If you can’t golf, you’re going to suck at OptiShot’s sim. That’s because you take full-blooded hacks at a ball with a real driver, iron or putter, and not a gamepad or mouse as with, say, EA’s PGA Tour series. The swinging mat has two strips of 16 infrared sensors that detect when your club zips through the ball before, during and after contact. It measures your clubhead speed to within plus or minus 2 MPH, and the face angle and swing path to within 1.5 and 1.9 degrees, respectively. The sim then figures out the distance your ball would travel in real life and whether it’d hook, slice or go straight.

If you can play a little, it’s stupidly fun. I used a BenQ 1080p projector and high-end PC, with all the realism settings cranked. The graphics aren’t quite as good as World Golf Tour or other top-notch golf games, but they’re definitely good enough, and anyway, it’s not meant to be a video game per se. Rather, it makes boring practice more entertaining by making you care about each swing — if you fluff a shot, you’ll get beat by an online rival or shoot a bad score.

To kick things off, you install the OptiShot2 software on your PC or Mac, download the courses and plug in the hardware. The company recommends a minimum 8.5-foot-high ceiling, though you may need more than that — if you’re tall and want to swing a driver, a 10-foot or higher ceiling might be required. You can optionally calibrate your clubs and tell the system’s auto-caddy which one to hand you for a given distance. To pretend you’re Bubba Watson, you can cheat the settings so that the ball flies much farther than it would in real life.

Once you take a hack with or without a ball, its digital counterpart will accurately slice into the rough or power down the fairway. You can fine-tune the settings for more wind, higher rough difficulty or faster greens, to name a few options. From there, just play the course as you would in real life, hitting drivers, irons, chips and putts.

The system does a good job of measuring your swing, with a few exceptions. I compared it against a Zepp swing analyzer, and it matched the swing speed and clubface angle closely. As with the Zepp, I was hitting drives about 250-260 yards, and deserved any slices or hooks it gave me. That feedback forced me to make the necessary adjustments to avoid spraying the ball all over the digital links. When I did go to play on a real course, I found that extra concentration helpful — on a driving range, it’s too easy to just turn your brain off, since there’s nothing to play for.

The OptiShot2 picks up center, toe or heel contact, but not “fat” or thin shots. That’s because it can’t measure the height of your club above the sensor, so a real-life “topped” shot might look just fine on the sim. It also means chipping isn’t very realistic, as face contact is critical on such shots. The simulated putting was reasonably accurate, however, according to a comparison I made with the 3Bays GSA Putt. In any case, the OptiShot2 can’t help your putting or chipping much — those two disciplines have to be practiced on a real green. Having them work consistently makes the game more fun, though, especially with head-to-head play.

If you want a more realistic playing experience, it’s doable — for a price. A sum of $300 will get you an octagonal mat, raising your feet slightly and giving them more grip than, say, your hardwood floor. There’s also a $110 hitting net that you can bang real golf balls into for extra feel (and danger), along with plastic tees and foam balls.

You can set up online games and invite up to four friends for stroke or match play (offline games are also possible). This is just as amusing as it sounds, although you’re trusting your pals not to fudge the settings. You can play on 15 included courses, or buy extra “Platinum” tracks at $30 bucks a pop. Amusingly, the company added a knockoff Augusta National course called “Sweet Magnolia” in time for the Masters. In fact, many of the courses are clones of real-life championship layouts with the names changed for copyright reasons.

On my first simulated OptiShot2 game I failed to break 100 and I’m a 14-handicap, so that was embarrassing. But that’s just the point: By accurately tracking your swing, the system forces you to bear down and play better. After shaking off a bit of rust and grooving a better motion, things started looking up and after about 15 games, I shot a 75 at “Sweet Magnolia.”

Then came the acid test: a real golf course. I played my first real round of the year and lo, I actually scored decently. So, the OptiShot succeeds on two counts for me — it’s super fun, and it helped my full swing by forcing me to practice better. It can’t help your short game much, but the chipping and putting simulations are good enough to keep it fun. My only reservation is the price: a full setup, including the octagonal mat, net and a few courses runs nearly $1,000, the same price as a membership at my local club. But if you’re a golf nut with means, it’ll give you a fun way to practice so that when you hit the links for real, you’ll be ready.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

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