Star Wars: Battlefront (series)



"For years you've watched the greatest Star Wars battles

What If...

You could actually live them..."

- Trailer tagline for the first game.

A series of video games set in the Star Wars universe, developed by Pandemic Studios. The series is heavily inspired by Battlefield; in a typical match, called "Conquest", there are two armies trying to gain control of "Command Posts" across the battlefield. If a player dies, they can respawn at any command post that their team controls. There is also a "Capture the Flag" gametype (consisting of both the standard 2-Flag CTF and 1-Flag CTF, where two armies try to carry a flag in the center to a designated spot in enemy territory), and, in the second game, "Assault" (Space-only, not counting Mos Eisley, where two space forces engage each other in an attempt to destroy the opposing fleet), as well as "Hunt" (where two teams hunt each other, trying to be the first to reach the set score limit before the timer runs down).

The battles are often huge, sometimes bigger than the movie scenes they are inspired by, involving dozens of players and even more NPCs. In addition, players can hop into various Star Wars vehicles ranging from tiny hover-bikes to aircraft to Humongous Mecha.

In the sequel, predictably entitled Star Wars Battlefront II, players can also play as Jedi, Sith, and various other "Hero" units from the movies. It also introduced space battles, where players have to defend their teams capital ships from sabotage and shoot down enemy fighters.

The game also had a single-player campaign featuring the 501st, a company of stormtroopers (named after a fan organization that specializes in Stormtrooper armor and other uniforms) that served the Republic and Empire from the Battle of Geonosis to the Battle of Hoth and as Darth Vader's personal legion from the time Order 66 was issued onwards.

There have been two spin-offs, both of which are for the PSP and the later of which is also available on the DS. Battlefront III has had leaked footage, but with Free Radical Designs' collapse, the game is currently without a developer. For hope and rumours on another sequel, check battlefront3.net.

Tropes common to the series:

 * Achilles Heel / For Massive Damage: Every land-based vehicle has a weak point that can be hit with a rocket to deal extra damage.
 * Artificial Stupidity
 * Attack Its Weak Point: Hitting vehicles in their "critical hit location" (it changes between vehicles) will cause additional damage.
 * Base On Legs: The AT-TE and AT-AT walkers are mobile spawn points. In the first, the walkers count as command posts for the purposes of automatic unit attrition and "capture all command posts to win", meaning the enemy had to not only capture all the fixed command posts but destroy the walkers in order to win. And the walkers respawn.
 * Beam Spam: The battlefields can get very sparkly very quickly. Chainguns and Repeating Blasters use this as a legitimate tactical advantage; the chaingun especially creates a blitz of purple beams that are very visible.
 * BFG: Several varieties.
 * Big Badass Battle Sequence: Geonosis, Hoth, Endor... Heck, any map can be host to one of these.
 * Bloodless Carnage: True to the source material in that way.
 * Boom Headshot: Instant kills for sniper units, obviously.
 * Color Coded for Your Convenience: Your team is blue or green (depending on which game you're playing) while the enemy is red on the maps.
 * Crippling Overspecialization: Droidekas are prohibitively slow. You can move faster without your shield or your ability to fire your weapons though.
 * Mighty Glacier: Once they get into position with their shields up though, they turn into movable machine gun nests nigh impossible to approach from the front.
 * Deflector Shields: In addition to the capital ship shields in the second game, Droidekas have personal shielding they can deploy in both games.
 * Development Hell: Battlefront III looks mostly finished, but it lacks a developer since the one working on it was bought out. An employee of Lucas Arts claims that the game is "up in the air" at this point.
 * Energy Weapon: And lots of them!
 * Faceless Goons: Droids, clone troopers, and most Imperials.
 * Five Token Band: The rebels in both games (White male soldier, white/black (depending on map) male rocket launcher user, asian female sniper and Ambiguously Brown technician). Becomes extremely odd with the 2nd game's ability to change class at a command post.
 * Frickin Laser Beams: Green, blue, and red.
 * Humongous Mecha: Of various shapes and sizes.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Each soldier carries two guns. When they swap between them, whichever gun they are currently holding just sort of disappears.
 * Idiosyncratic Cover Art
 * Legion of Doom: The CIS and the Imperials.
 * Lightning Gun: The arc/bolt casters.
 * Macross Missile Massacre: The Hailfire droid tanks.
 * Made of Explodium: Everything, even what appear to be totally solid objects like doors.
 * Magic Bullets
 * Magic Tool: The fusion cutter, which can be used to build/repair literally anything that can be destroyed, and also hijack vehicles in the second game.
 * The Medic: Pilots and engineers can dispense bacta to heal the wounded.
 * No OSHA Compliance: The Death Star and both Bespin maps. Seriously, wouldn't a couple handrails at least be nice when dozens of personnel are scampering only a couple feet away from falling into the sky?
 * One Hit Kill: Headshots, as stated above, but it's also possible to land on top of enemy units with air and space-based vehicles. This is the easiest, if not the only way, to kill Jedi in the first game. An easier One Hit Kill (on some battlefields) is by shooting the ground near them with a missile or grenade, blowing the Jedi into whatever bottomless pit happens to be nearby. The most satisfying one, though, is to use a vehicle to push the Jedi into the waiting tentacles of the Sarlacc on the Tatooine map.
 * One Man Army: You can easily become this.
 * Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: Subverted: Both games' box art depict stormtroopers marching menacingly towards the viewer, but in both cases, their weapons are are firing somewhere off to the side.
 * The Siege: Hoth.
 * Spider Tank: The CIS controls one with a particle beam cannon. Slow, but damned effective on both infantry and armor when it gets into range.
 * Spiritual Successor: Pandemic's Lord of the Rings: Conquest, which is essentially Battlefront but not IN SPACE!
 * Stuff Blowing Up
 * Suicidal Overconfidence: My God, where to begin? A single stormtrooper attacking six Wookiees, a guy with no grenades left and a pistol attacking a tank, a scout ship going up against the most heavily armed capital starship in the game...
 * It should be noted that, while it doesn't happen often, success in these situations does happen, from time to time.
 * Tank Goodness: Every faction gets at least one tank type. Even the Rebellion. Meaning that on the right maps, one gets epic infantry/armor battles.
 * Third Person Shooter: Can also be set to first person.
 * Urban Warfare: The Cloud City and Theed maps. Chokepoints, hiding places, and sniper balconies galore.
 * You All Look Familiar: there are five types of rebels in the original, and six in the sequel.
 * Generic Jedi characters in Battlefront II's campaign are like this, too.
 * You Are Number Six: Only the Rebels get actual names; the clones, droids and Imperials are stuck with designation numbers.

Tropes specific to the first game:

 * Apocalypse How / Earthshattering Kaboom: Class X in the first game's Galactic Conquest mode, courtesy of the Death Star. Can happen repeatedly until the playing field is nearly barren.
 * High Altitude Battle: The first map on Bespin, starting off on the gas platforms seen in the background on approach to Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back.
 * Ramming Always Works: The heroes are immune to every weapon, but running them over with a vehicle does the job.
 * The Siege: Rhen Var's harbor map.

Tropes specific to the sequel:

 * Achilles Heel: Capital ships in space battles can be crippled by targeting vital systems, both through internal sabotage and simply using bombs.
 * Action Girl: Aayla Secura, a Twi'lek Jedi who absolutely rips through enemies with two lightsabers. Princess Leia to a lesser degree as well.
 * Applied Phlebotinum: The energy crystal the player must receive early in II's campaign, which turns out to be a key component of the Death Star's superlaser.
 * Awesome but Impractical: The award sniper rifle is short-ranged, while the chaingun is slow to start firing and is horribly inaccurate. But the sniper can skewer enemies, and the chaingun rips a droideka to shreds in seconds!
 * Base In Space: Landing craft in space battles.
 * Batman Can Breathe in Space: Averted, going outside in Polis Massa will drain your health unless you're in a tank or are a droid. Walking out of your capital ship in a space battle has the same effect as jumping into one of the numerous bottomless pits, although it is possible through a glitch to land a ship outside the hangar and walk around on the outside edge of the ship without dying of asphyxiation.
 * Battle Aura: Shows up whenever the player gets a Cosmetic Award that doesn't have a new weapon as its reward.
 * Beating a Dead Player: Some bots, usually rebels, will run up to a dead enemy/player's body, draw their pistols, and repeatedly shoot it. Usually while taunting.
 * Big Badass Battle Sequence: In many ways, the entire point of the game. In the PC version, there's an "XL" gamemode, which is like Conquest except with even more people on the field at once. It's only available on maps based on the biggest battles of the series.
 * Bittersweet Ending: Noticeably averted in that the last mission in the single-player campaign is the Battle of Hoth, which the Empire wins triumphantly and with the narrator believing that the Rebellion had been completely crushed. The Battle of Endor, the end to the movie series, isn't mentioned at all. Presumably, the story of the game is either being told before Endor or the 501st just wasn't at Endor (despite being almost literally everywhere else in the movies).
 * Played straight thanks to some Fridge Horror: you never play the Endor mission because the narrator died before he could record an audio log about it.
 * Black Cloak: Most of the Imperial/CIS heroes.
 * Cosmetic Award: Medals in II, up until you get four of any specific medal, which then grants you a bonus depending on what the medal is. Getting the medal 64 times on one profile gives you the bonus in question permanently for singleplayer games.
 * Critical Encumbrance Failure: Characters that can use the Force to increase their jumping or a jetpack to fly are unable to do so if they're carrying a flag or some other important object.
 * Curb Stomp Battle: From a story perspective, the 501st utterly eviscerate the Rebels on Yavin and Hoth.
 * Downer Ending: The Empires victory in Galactic Conquest. Han is still frozen, Vader force chokes Leia to death, all life on Endor is massacred, and Luke kneels before The Emperor.
 * Also, the CIS ending. Sidious leads the assault on the Jedi Temple with an army of Battle Droids, Darth Maul and Jango Fett (somehow back alive) massacring Clone Troopers, General Grievous hunts down the rest of the Jedi and Count Dooku kills Anakin on Mustafar.
 * Evil Brit: In true Star Wars tradition. In fact, one Imperial (the announcer) is labeled in the credits as "Smarmy British Palpatine Ally".
 * Game Breaking Bug:
 * CTF on Mos Eisley has one where Jawas are capable of picking up flags. Jawas are set to be allied for both sides in order to penalize collateral damage, meaning that if you play with friendly fire off and a Jawa picks up a flag, no one's getting it until the Jawa randomly runs into the flag capture point.
 * The Steam version has a nasty, very common one that causes a crash to desktop when a map is being loaded. This bug is infamous mainly due to the fact that the only currently known way to prevent it is to play the game with a plugged in mic.
 * Game Mod: Several, two of the most famous being the Battlefront Conversion Pack, which adds content from the original game, as well as new maps and hero units from Knights of the Old Republic and The Force Unleashed, and Dark Times II: Rising Son, which adds even more maps, tons of new units, and a standalone Galactic Conquest campaign starring Luke Skywalker.
 * Gundamjack: In a space battle between the 501st and a rebuilt droid army, Vader demands that one of the CIS bombers be stolen and taken back to the main hangar.
 * Any time you raid an enemy hangar (useful for taking out the auto-turret defenses, shields, life support, and engines quickly) you will have to steal an enemy fighter. Yours tends to end up either destroyed or hijacked while you're wreaking havoc.
 * The engineer's fusion cutter can be used to boot an enemy out of their vehicle, allowing you to hijack it.
 * Happy Ending: The Republic Campaign in Galactic Conquest mode in II shows Mace Windu killing Palpatine, Obi-Wan killing Grievous, and Anakin becoming a Jedi Master.
 * Impossibly Cool Weapon: Lightsabers.
 * Its Up to You: Allies in the campaign can't accomplish objectives on their own (the player needs to be present for a control point to be captured despite the dozen friendlies swarming over it, only the player can carry the holocron, ect).
 * MacGuffin: The Death Star plans.
 * More Dakka: The commando pistol is basically a regular blaster pistol with its max fire rate quintupled. Clone Commanders also get shoulder-mounted miniguns.
 * No Campaign for The Wicked: Inverted; this is the first Star Wars game since TIE Fighter to offer only an Imperial campaign - and this time, you're not too busy dealing with traitors to actually fight the Rebellion.
 * Pre Explosion Glow: In space battles, certain parts of capital ships will begin glowing and making weird noises before finally blowing up.
 * Shell Shocked Veteran: The narrator for campaign mode.
 * Shout Out: The CIS announcer, a Battle Droid, occasionally will refer to the enemy as "meatbags".
 * The tutorial for space combat tells you to "use bombers wisely"
 * While playing as Han Solo on a map other than Mos Eisley Assault, your Imperial opponents will occasionally exclaim "It's Han Solo! And he's shooting first! That's not fair!"
 * Sniper Pistol: The Precision Pistol (earned by getting 6 pistol kills in one life) is this.
 * Sure Why Not or I Knew It: The methods that have been constantly brought up by fans for common infantry to kill Jedi (Actually using fully automatic fire, shotguns, shooting them with something bigger than small arms, abandoning Mook Chivalry) are the most effective way to kill the generic Jedi in campaign mode.
 * Even these might not be enough, which is why there's the merry tactic of switching to a heavy trooper, taking out a landmine, and smacking the Jedi in the face with it.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial: "Officially, there was no clone rebellion on Kamino."
 * Trap Door: The trap door in front of Jabba the Hutt's throne is faithfully reproduced in the "Jabba's Lair" map and stepping on it it will dump you into the Rancor pit. Which, if you're careful enough, also contains a handy short cut to the lower levels.
 * It's worth noting though, that the rancor doesn't actually move, and won't kill you unless you walk up to it like a moron. It's perfectly possible to leave just by walking around the darned thing.
 * Unexplained Recovery: Darth Maul and Jango Fett in the CIS ending.
 * Villain Protagonist: Story mode, at least after the halfway point.
 * What Measure Is a Mook: Subverted quite prettily with the campaign. The destruction of the Death Star is described in the campaign. The people who replaced the 501st are described as "poor souls" and the entire premise of the last three or four missions is to wipe out every single Rebel who had the slightest bit of involvement in it. There's even something approaching a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming when you win the battle on Yavin 4 and when the officer commanding you says, "Well done. The spirits of our fallen brothers will sleep soundly tonight."
 * There is another Crowning Moment of Awesome when the narrator describes the victory on Hoth.

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