Talk of Star Wars Battlefront 3 has ramped up this week, with a number of studios reportedly in with a chance of developing the shooter sequel.
The rumor kicked off when Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb read out a snippet from Electronic Gaming Monthly’s revived Quarterman column, which claimed Disney has “big plans” for the Star Wars Battlefront series. According to EGM, Lucasfilm is looking for a development partner for Battlefront 3, and two studios are “circling” the project: DICE, developer of Battlefield and Battlefront, and Bungie, developer of Halo, Destiny, and Marathon.
The potential for a Battlefront 3 is hugely exciting for fans of the series, of course, and if it does end up green lit, DICE would be the obvious course to develop it, although how the game would fit with the ongoing work on the Battlefield series remains to be seen.
Bungie, though, would be a huge surprise as developer of Battlefront 3. The Sony-owned studio is working to turn around struggling extraction shooter Marathon, and only last month Bungie said more Destiny is coming, months after ending support for Destiny 2. It feels unlikely that Bungie would have the scope to make a fully fleshed out Battlefront 3, at least not any time soon. Would parent company Sony even be receptive to such an idea? Would Bungie?
Plot twist! Joe Brammer, boss of Wardogs developer Bulkhead, just… tweeted it out. But rather than Bungie, it’s Titanfall, Apex Legends, and Star Wars Jedi developer Respawn that’s working with DICE on Battlefront 3, according to Brammer. "DICE and from what I’ve heard Respawn are working on Battlefront 3," he said on X / Twitter. "Not sure what that means for Battlefield."
What’s actually going on here? Well, it doesn’t sound like Battlefront 3 is in production yet, if Lucasfilm is on the hunt for development partners. But it’s entirely plausible that DICE and Respawn have done pre-production work, fleshing out what the game will be and how it will work, while looking for studios to help build it.
And before we get our hopes up, it’s worth remembering that Battlefront fans have been here before. TimeSplitters developer Free Radical Design has a Battlefront 3 game that was pretty much done before it fell by the wayside around 2008. Assets and even builds of the game have leaked online ever since.
EA eventually had DICE pick up the mantle and reboot the series with the hugely popular Star Wars Battlefront in 2015. But its sequel, 2017’s Battlefront 2, suffered a disastrous launch fueled by a backlash to loot boxes. DICE spent years righting the ship, to the point now where Battlefront 2 is held in pretty high regard.
If DICE is working on Battlefront 3 in some capacity, it’ll do so without much of the original development team, which scattered to various studios in Sweden and abroad in the wake of Battlefront 2’s release. Some of the developers went to Embark, developer of The Finals and Arc Raiders. Indeed, I’ve already seen some suggest Embark as the perfect fit for a Battlefront 3.
Star Wars video games are in a positive moment, with the positive reception to Bit Reactor’s strategy game Zero Company and Fuse Games’ Galactic Racer sparking excitement over what might come next from the franchise. Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly recently told The Game Business that “huge triple-A games like Battlefront are always going to be an essential part of the strategy,” but smaller-scale games in different genres are also in the works.
"Good ideas can come from a lot of different places. You don’t have to necessarily be a top five publisher to make a great Star Wars game,” he continued. “There are some hurdles. We have a high quality bar, and that means typically we work with more experienced teams than ones with no track record. But we’re exploring all kinds of things, large and small, with partners that are going to surprise folks."
Bungie would certainly fit the bill.