Electronic Arts is putting a good chunk of effort into promoting the campaign side of Star Wars Battlefront 2. The tale of Inferno Squad’s retaliation against the Rebellion for blowing up Death Star 2.0 and snuffing the Emperor, set up in the recently-released single-player trailer, looks very promising. Just don’t expect it to last very long.
“We thought that around 5-7, maybe 8 hours is probably a good amount of time,” producer David Robillard told Press Start. “We wanted to stay very driven towards the Star Wars fantasy that the players are going to experience and not have it be drawn out.”
Robillard added that EA isn’t ready yet to commit to story-based DLC for the game (there won’t be a season pass), saying that the likelihood of an expansion will be “based on the reception the single player has.”
Five hours is definitely on the shorter side of things, but is that really a knock against the game? Despite EA’s emphasis on the interstellar adventures of Iden Versio, Star Wars Battlefront 2 is first and foremost about the multiplayer action. And as Robillard alluded to, shorter campaigns can be effective and memorable if they’re done well—a short, sharp shock that sticks with you when it’s over. Whether or not Battlefront 2 can pull that off is a question we’ll have answered soon enough: It comes out on November 17.