EA Motive Reveals ‘Star Wars: Battlefront 2’ Writers

“Star Wars: Battlefront 2” is confirmed to have a single-player story mode, and game director Mark Thompson has revealed its writers. The story mode will be written by “Spec Ops: The Line” scribe Walt Williams and former IGN video game editor Mitch Dyer.

The story of “Battlefront 2” will focus on the Imperial soldier Iden Versio, the commander of the special forces known as the Inferno Squad. Unlike previous installments, “Battlefront 2” will see the story from the perspective of those loyal to the Empire instead of the heroes of the Rebel Alliance.

Game director Mark Thompson revealed that their preparation for writing the game’s new story mode involved reading up on Disney and Lucasfilm’s new “Star Wars” canon since the previous Expanded Universe stories are now known as “Legends.”

The new canon includes all the books under “The Journey to The Force Awakens” like Chuck Wendig’s “Aftermath,” Claudia Gray’s “Lost Stars,” Greg Rucka’s comic “Shattered Empire” and Alexander Freed’s 2015 “Battlefront” tie-in novel, “Twilight Company.”

“Both of our writers — Walt Williams and Mitch Dyer — are veracious fans of ‘Star Wars’ and had already read most of these things I had to play a lot of catch up to [approach] their encyclopedic knowledge of everything that existed,” Thompson told Glixel in a recent Q&A. “Then we went to Lucasfilm and we presented them a picture around the idea of a soldier story, post-Return of the Jedi, from the Empire's perspective, and we felt like we'd done our homework on the the kinds of stories that they were already telling.”

The revelation that Williams is writing for “Battlefront 2” is quite significant. It would explain why he left 2K Games in 2014 and only continued working on the “Spec Ops” franchise in the background, as pointed out by PC Gamer. Williams revealed on Twitter that he’s been working on “Battlefront 2” for the last year with Dyer.

Dyer left IGN back in April 2016 only stating that he was hired for a secret project in Montreal. Motive Studios is headquartered in Montreal in Quebec, Canada.

The combination of Williams and Dyer shows that EA, DICE and Motive are taking “Battlefront 2’s” story mode very seriously. One of the biggest complaint about 2015’s “Battlefront” was it’s lack of a single-player campaign.

“Star Wars: Battlefront 2” is scheduled for release on Nov. 17, 2017 for the PS4, Xbox One and the PC. EA has also confirmed that the game won’t have a DLC Season Pass but will have “something different” instead.