EA Explains Why Star Wars Battlefront Won’t Expand Outside the Original Trilogy

Canon is a weird, loosely defined thing in fiction—unless you’re talking about the Star Wars universe, because Lucasfilm has a “Story Group” dedicated to keeping Star Wars canon locked down, which mostly involved throwing out the entire expanded universe. Now, that pesky canon cannon is shooting down hopes of Star Wars Battlefront content outside the scope of the game’s current setting.

Polygon reports that on an earnings call last week, EA’s chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, said, “You can’t make a game in Star Wars that violates the canon of Star Wars,” according to a transcript from Seeking Alpha. That may sound a bit weird when the game already has a “Battle of Jakku” expansion, since Jakku is a new planet on the Star Wars block, but that battle occurred soon after the events of Return of the Jedi in-universe, as the remnants of the Empire fought against the New Republic.

What the game won’t do is branch out with its DLC much beyond that into the timeline of the prequels or the current ongoing trilogy—surely a bummer for EA with the massive success of The Force Awakens. That’s not to say that there won’t be future games, maybe even in the same series, that tackle those eras, but that’s apparently the not-at-all-silly reason they were deemed off-limits for the current Battlefront: canon.

I look forward to seeing my every Battlefront Force-choke and lightsaber throw in Battlefront—plus all the times Darth Vader has undoubtedly been “teabagged”—acknowledged as canon in the next edition of the Star Wars visual dictionary. We all know canon is very important in video game adaptations.

(via Polygon, image via EA Games)

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