LucasArts announces Battlefront 2

As part of the 3rd annual Star Wars Celebration in Indiana, LucasArts
took advantage of the party atmosphere to officially announced the
sequel to last year’s online shooter, Star Wars: Battlefront. Pandemic
Studios will again helm the development of the title to bring all six
chapters of the space opera to the PS2, Xbox and PC.

As before, players will choose their favorite sides of the epic
battles, then pick a soldier class with unique abilities in order to
complete basic area-capture missions with up to 63 other players (PC
owners only) online. New to the game will be Jedi classes, available in
very limited form. Locales from this summer’s Revenge of the Sith will
also be added. Likely the most notable addition will be the space
dogfights. Players will start on their respective team’s ship in orbit
or deep space. They can then choose to defend their ship from the
inside on foot or by manning the laser canons on the ship, or they can
take a small fighter to fight off incoming enemy ships. Finally, if
they so choose, they can dock with the enemy capital ship in an attempt
to take control from the inside.

Not out until Fall 2005, the
success of the game will be up in the air. The first enjoyed a moderate
success, releasing alongside the Star Wars Trilogy DVD’s and preceeding
Halo 2. Some of the biggest complaints were those of 1 player, 1 box:
the split and quad screen players are used to with first person
shooters on the Xbox and PS2 was void. Despite the draw to fans of the
movies, the game didn’t match the quality in graphics and gameplay that
had been set so high by the king of shooters, Halo.

The screenshots we have here show promise, but could still use a little polish. For more game info visit http://www.lucasarts.com/games/swbattlefrontii .