Theories suggesting Droideka are being added to Star Wars Battlefront 2 have been running rampant ever since an update from EA DICE appeared to include a hidden teaser, but the developers say that there aren’t any plans to add the rolling droids.
EA DICE shared a post with the community about the Elite Corps Update that’s coming soon, an update that includes Clone Wars content and more. Heroes, different appearances for playable classes, and other features will be included in the update, and many people counted Droideka among the new content that they could expect because of an image shared by the developers. A promotional image for the Clone Wars content shared alongside the community post hid what appeared to be a Droideka in the back, thus fueling the speculation that the droids were to be added soon.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Just a note about ‘that’ screenshot.
Forums: //t.co/Dx0y54WCuF
Reddit: //t.co/T2R93aUrzE pic.twitter.com/RjNPhwzR0w
โ Ben Walke (@BenWalke) August 24, 2018
Ben Walke, community manager for Star Wars Battlefront II, said that he had nothing to offer on the situation and said that “everyone can make their own minds up.” Walke followed that statement up with another that was shared on Reddit and the game’s forums to say that EA DICE was even a bit confused by the Droideka’s appearance.
“When we first started to see mentions of Droideka the instant answer from us was ‘no,’ which at the time we believed to be 100% correct,” the explanation post said. “This is because we currently have no active plans for a Droideka, nor do we have any assets within our active development version of the game. While we saw the similarities, we believed it could have been a crashed speeder or environmental clutter.”
For that reason, EA DICE said, the developers came out quickly to say that it wasn’t a Droideka. They wanted to react quickly and avoid having players get too excited about something that wasn’t intended. Upon closer inspection, EA DICE discovered that it was indeed a Droideka that was in the image, though there are no plans to add the droids to the game.
“Because we have the ability to reload the scene (think of it like opening a save point in a level) a screenshot was created in, we did some additional investigation. It was during this investigation that we found an old, unused and partially built asset of a Droideka. The asset itself is nothing more than a static model. It has zero integration into the game, meaning it is currently missing, rigging, animation, VFX, audio, abilities, UI and more.”
The screenshot containing the Droideka was created using a version of the game that had the unused assets, the developers explained, but steps are being taken to make sure such an event does not happen again.