Star Wars Battlefront skipped single-player to launch alongside The Force Awakens

Electronic Arts released Star Wars Battlefront without a single-player campaign so that it could arrive "side-by-side" with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, according to EA Studios executive vice president Patrick Soderlund. During an investor presentation yesterday, Soderlund talked about the criticisms the company received for Battlefront's multiplayer focus.

"It was a conscious decision we made due to time and being able to launch the game side-by-side with the movie that came out to get the strongest possible impact," Soderlund said of the game, as reported by GameSpot.

Battlefront launched in November on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One, ahead of The Force Awakens' December premiere. Despite the release being timed to meet the film's, Battlefront doesn't feature any content from the seventh Star Wars movie.

Instead, it's a multiplayer-heavy game set during the original trilogy. While Soderlund maintained that the game was a success with a broad demographic of players, he acknowledged that there were complaints (including from Force Awakens actor John Boyega) about its "depth and breadth."

"The depth and breadth is something that's proving to be more and more important in a world where we want $60 upfront and want people to stay with us a for a long time," he said. "The depth of what we offer is important.

"[When] Battlefront came out, it totally nailed a lot of these factors, but we got criticized for the depth and breadth of it."

Future iterations of the Star Wars game will confront the single-player issue, he confirmed.

"As we look at why that was, we have to go back and course correct it for another version, if we were ever to build it."

A second Battlefront is coming, EA announced earlier this month. The sequel will launch sometime next year and will this time include content based on the newer Star Wars films, like this December's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.