The Children Yearn for ‘Battlefront 3'

Gizmodo

21-05-2025

If you are in any online Star Wars circles right now, odds are, completely unprompted, you've probably seen people commenting about getting a third Battlefront game. It's been the best part of a decade since Battlefront II released, and there's no signs of life in the franchise it seems, as far as EA is concerned. But that's not going to stop fans from trying to get the company's attention any way they can.
The sudden surge in interest for Battlefront 3 has come from a mix of things. Right now, it's arguably a pretty good time to be a Star Wars fan, between the the climax of Andor, the post-May-4th-glow, and Revenge of the Sith's 20th anniversary (which itself heralds the impending 20th anniversary of the original Battlefront II later this year). Perhaps particularly pointed to Battlefront fans too is the fact that the galaxy far, far away's already being lovingly platformed (and occasionally a little more controversially) by one of the biggest shooters around, Fortnite, for its ongoing Star Wars special season.
It's led some to go back to Battlefront II, EA and DICE's 2017 shooter that launched to mixed acclaim but managed to carve its way to a respectable Star Wars shooting experience by the time post-launch support trailed off after the launch of Rise of Skywalker a couple years later. In the past few weeks, Steam DB reports that the player counts for the game on PC have surged from an average of just 1-2,000 people to highs of nearly 8,000 this past weekend, a height not seen since 2021. The mandatory change.org petitions calling for a sequel have risen up, and, of course, Star Wars online fandoms, from the Battlefront Reddit to TikTok and X comments, have been filled with memes, yearning, and a shared demand on everyone's lips: Battlefront III when?
The answer is, unfortunately, probably not for a very long while. Even with the current upsurge in interest in Battlefront II, EA's management of the Star Wars video game brand has proven a bit murky in recent years, even with brilliant titles like Respawn's Jedi games or the intriguing, upcoming tactics title Zero Company, beset by behind-the-scenes turmoil at the publisher and the cancellation of several potential Star Wars titles. Battlefront II itself, despite selling millions of copies, was never quite seen as the oversized success EA wanted, especially when at launch it was beset with controversy. It took years of continual support and updates to flesh out the game's celebration of the sequel, original, and prequel trilogy eras before public opinion on the game turned around, but by then, it was too late for hopes of a third game to really get off the ground.
Grimly, this is somewhat fitting for the franchise, both in terms of Star Wars—which loves itself a cycle of thematically repeated storytelling—and Battlefront itself, because the series has found itself in this exact instance already. EA and Dice rebooted Battlefront back in 2015, a decade after Battlefront II released and several years after that version of the series' own third entry had been scrapped. The original hypothetical Battlefront III has infamously leaked over and over for years now, from story campaign cutscenes to gameplay from recovered builds of the title, as fans hoped and prayed that somehow, some day, Battlefront III would happen. While we have no evidence at all that a Battlefront sequel to the 2017 game is currently in the works, as was the case with the cancelled sequel to the 2005 game, in this time of Star Wars anniversary reflectiveness, there's a bit of dark humor in finding Battlefront fans in the exact same place today as they were in the late aughts.
Hoping in spite of unlikely outcomes, however, is a deeply Star Wars sentiment. If rebellions can be built on it, why not video games?