Recently, DICE and Criterion released an add-on in Star Wars Battlefront for free, the X-Wing VR Missions. It has paved a great way for a lot of possibility that Rogue Squadron might have a reboot really soon. The potential of how both teams developed this short, yet awesome, Star Wars X-Wing VR exclusive made myself think: “it will be great if EA would decide to bring back Rogue Squadron”.
To those who don’t know what Star Wars: Rogue Squadron is, it’s an action space-simulator developed and released by Factor 5 and LucasArts in the year 1998. It was released for the N64 and PC, and it received a lot praises from the critics – GamePro gave it a perfect 5 stars, IGN gave it 8.8, and it has a total score of 85 in Metacritic. Then with its success, it was followed with the release of Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader where the players control Luke Skywalker and Wedge Antilles.
Rogue II (which was exclusive to Nintendo’s GameCube) was the most successful installment of the series in the year 2001 that made the franchise great. With its graphical improvement and great space battles and levels, no other Star Wars space-games has surpassed the likes of the Rogue Squadron franchise. Who doesn’t want to do the trench-run level again in Rogue II on DICE’s Frostbite Engine, and also on VR? It’s going to be spectacular.
Now, it boils down to the question: will EA decide to make a reboot of Rogue Squadron? There’s a likely possibility that they would, and that X-Wing VR Missions is one of their appetizers, if I may call it, before they would bring out the main course. X-Wing VR felt more like a demo, a sneak peek preview, of what may come in the future.
We all know that Star Wars Battlefront II from DICE is coming next year, but with Criterion’s involvement in the development of Star Wars games, since all Star Wars games licensing is exclusive to EA already, there’s a bigger picture to what they’ve shown us in X-Wing VR – most likely a Rogue Squadron reboot or a whole new series in the future. This reboot should be similar to the upcoming Ace Combat 7, which is not a VR exclusive but compatible with the VR device – giving the option to players to still play with or without a VR headset.
Now, now, I’m not saying that they are now developing a Rogue Squadron reboot, no, there’s no confirmation yet. But isn’t it going to be awesome if they will actually do a reboot? However, there’s a caveat to it though, with what we’ve experienced with EA’s Battlefront, if they would decide a reboot of Rogue Squadron, it may have a lot of paid DLC content and a Season Pass like Battlefront. It’s not hard to figure that out especially EA is milking everyone because Star Wars is a huge and beloved franchise by most people – gamers and hardcore fans alike; and that they would give us “technically” an unfinished game with its content handed down to us through DLCs.
If it was still LucasArts who published these Star Wars games then we would surely get a full-house game without paid DLC content post launch. Since Disney bought the sole-rights of Star Wars and its merchandise, they had also given the exclusive-games licensing rights of Star Wars to EA. There are Star Wars video-games coming from Visceral Games (who is headed by Amy Hennig, the former creative director from Naughty Dog and the person behind Uncharted) and Respawn Entertainment. But, all of these games will surely be overlooked if a Star Wars Rogue Squadron game will come back for a reboot.
Do you guys want a Star Wars Rogue Squadron reboot? Let us know in the comments!
