After The Fall

Can the jam-packed STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT II make us sympathize with the bad guys?

- Samuel Roberts

Star Wars has a pretty good history of letting us play as the baddies. Whether it’s asserting Imperial dominance in TIE Fighter or encouraging Kyle Katarn to explore his dark side just to see the hammy ’90s FMVs in Jedi Knight, PC gaming has given us plenty of opportunities to see this universe from the bad-guy perspective. What you’ve never really seen in Star Wars, outside of the books, is the Empire portrayed with any nuance of morality or motivation, in the way that Rogue One (semi successfully) portrays the Rebellion as ruthless saboteurs. Battlefront II’s new single player campaign is an attempt to do just that, casting you as Iden Versio, an Imperial special forces operative who is 100% dedicated to the cause.“With something like Rogue One, you see Saw Gerrera and his group of more extreme Rebels, and they present a grey side of the good,” Lucasfilm’s Douglas Reilly tells me. “So we were interested in looking at, what’s the grey side of the bad? And that comes from a place of—when you take off that stormtrooper helmet—who is that person underneath? Why do they believe what they believe? Why do they feel the Empire is the right place to be? We wanted to explore what that meant to an individual who was truly committed and raised in the Empire, and fully believes in that. To her, and to the Empire, she is a hero.”

Iden’s father is a high-ranking general within the Empire, and she comes from Vardos, one of the game’s new planets, which is a redtinged Imperial utopia styled somewhere between the Citadel in Mass Effect and the posh rooftops of