For Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017), Lucasfilm was not just a final checkpoint for the campaign: game director Mark Thompson described the studio’s Story Group as a creative partner. In a November 2017 GamesBeat interview, he said the collaboration helped Motive make a story that felt coherent with Star Wars while giving the game its own voice.
Thompson described a partnership, not just an approval process
GamesBeat’s Jeff Grubb interviewed Thompson by phone for a story published November 25, 2017, and updated June 20, 2025. Thompson characterized the working relationship as collaborative: Motive and Lucasfilm shared a vocabulary for developing a game and its story. “We speak the same language when we talk about building a game and building the story for a game,” he said.
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He described the Story Group as people who combined enthusiasm for Star Wars with professional storytelling and lore expertise. “When we work with Lucasfilm’s story group, they’re all passionate Star Wars fans and storytellers,” he said. That is Thompson’s account of this production, rather than a claim about Lucasfilm’s present-day process.
The aim was coherence without making the game feel derivative
Thompson said early conversations focused on the campaign’s “voice”: why it should be a Star Wars story, what it could contribute, and how it could avoid simply repeating ideas from films, comics, or other publishing. He summarized the balance this way: “They want all of these different pieces of Star Wars to be consistent and coherent. But they also want each of these things to have its own voice, to contribute and do something different, to expand the universe.”
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For Motive, that balance became more concrete when the team settled on telling the story from a soldier’s perspective. Iden Versio, raised in an Imperial military family, offered a way to explore the aftermath of the Empire through a character whose loyalties and experience were rooted in that world.
How Lucasfilm’s input reached the details
Thompson recalled that the teams discussed some aspect of the project “probably every day.” He cited questions as specific as the sound of blasters, the way a droid’s energy systems worked, and what particular lights, buttons, or lenses on a newly designed droid were meant to do. Lucasfilm could consult its archives to help ensure new material sat comfortably alongside established Star Wars aesthetics and lore.
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He framed this attention to detail as practical world-building, not lore for its own sake: “We want to make sure we have the right information so when we’re developing features, it’s based on the kind of movie science of Star Wars.” The reported frequency is Thompson’s recollection; it is not an independently measured schedule.
Motive brought ideas and reading to the collaboration
Thompson said the development team chose to read newer canon stories, including Aftermath, Twilight Company, and Shattered Empire. He emphasized that Lucasfilm did not require this: “There was no obligation from Lucasfilm. They didn’t give us a reading list and say, hey, you need to study up on these things.”
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Instead, he said, Motive brought suggestions—including the messenger droid and Operation Cinder—to Lucasfilm and worked out how they might connect naturally to the campaign. The PlayStation.Blog interview with Thompson and Lucasfilm Story Group creative executive Steve Blank likewise describes Motive’s writers as familiar with stories that had already filled parts of the timeline gap.
Iden Versio’s campaign and its place in the timeline
The campaign follows Commander Iden Versio and Inferno Squad, an Imperial special-forces unit, in the period between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. Electronic Arts described the story in its 2017 announcement as spanning 30 years, from the destruction of the second Death Star toward the rise of the First Order.
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- Multiplayer modes include the objective-based scenarios of Strike, Galactic Assault, and Starfighter Assault, the close-quarters combat of Blast, and four-on-four battles in Heroes vs. Villains mode.
StarWars.com’s making-of retrospective says Motive pitched a story from an Imperial perspective and describes the premise as a collaboration with Lucasfilm’s Story Group. Story Group members were involved throughout production and attended shoots. The retrospective also notes that Doug Chiang advised on Inferno Squad armor, Dave Filoni discussed the narrative use of an Imperial special-forces unit, and Janina Gavankar voiced and performed Iden using motion capture.
That production context supports the distinction at the heart of Thompson’s interview: the campaign drew on established continuity, but its central perspective and character gave it a game-specific identity.
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What the interview does—and does not—establish
Thompson acknowledged that creative disagreements occurred, describing the process plainly: “Every part of creativity is messy.” He said discussion returned to the story the team wanted to tell. His interview offers a specific account of the Battlefront II campaign’s development in 2017; it should not be read as a description of current EA or Lucasfilm workflows.
EA’s April 15, 2017 announcement listed PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Origin for PC, and set a worldwide release date of November 17, 2017. Those are historical launch details, not confirmation of present store availability or stock.
Quick Recap
Sources
- GamesBeat: Jeff Grubb’s interview with Mark Thompson
- StarWars.com: Making Star Wars: Battlefront II
- PlayStation.Blog: Battlefront II Q&A with Mark Thompson and Steve Blank
- Electronic Arts: Battlefront II announcement and release details
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