Lucasfilm: We had weekly meetings with EA over SWBFII

Star Wars Battlefront II has just been release, and as you may well know, working with Star Wars as a brand is no easy task, as there's a lot riding on whether you get it right or wrong. In fact, Lucasfilm brand boss Douglas Reilly has given some information about the game's development to VentureBeat, saying that it was a close collaboration between Lucasfilm and EA.

"Yeah, that's very much true," he said when asked about whether his company is heavily involved. "We have a games team here that I run, that meets with all of our partners, and particularly we spend a lot of time with EA, both on the marketing side and the production teams. We bring in Lucasfilm's story team to help us shape and build the stories we're telling, so they fit in the continuity of all the other things we're doing with the Star Wars universe. So yes, we're very hands-on."

"In general, we'll have weekly meetings between the production teams and the marketing teams, with either EA in Redwood Shores or the individual teams in Stockholm and Montreal and Vancouver, wherever they have studios," he continued. "We have weekly meetings. Then we regularly go and visit in person, probably once a quarter, to sit with them, play builds of the games, walk through progress and where we're going in the future. We're constantly talking, meeting, and engaging with them in a very collaborative way."

"Sometimes it's, hey, where are we going with postlaunch content? Or a game that we haven't even announced yet. Sometimes it's big strategic thinking and sometimes it's all the way down to tactical — 'hey, we need reference for this particular vehicle or model' — that kind of conversation. It runs the gamut all the way from the most truly mundane to the highest levels of, what kind of stories do we tell and how do we want to tell them?"

Speaking about Battlefront II specifically, he said: "We've come together to create something that I think is a very unique, authentic, broad experience that allows you to have a story campaign, play in multiple planets across multiple eras, with a huge set of heroes and other characters. I think it's a testament, actually, to our ability to work together toward that vision, when you see the end product."

Do you think that Star Wars Battlefront II faithfully recreates the Star Wars universe?