Peter Vesti Frendrup
Level Design Portfolio
Crait
Star Wars Battlefront II (2018)
Crait is a level based on a planet from The Last Jedi. I started working on it a few months before we finished development of the main launch offering for Star Wars Battlefront II. I was finishing up the work on Endor as we kicked off work on Crait.
One of the big challenges when working on a level for an upcoming movie is obviously the secrecy surrounding the movie - especially when it's something as big as a Star Wars movie. Interestingly enough I encountered the exact same scenario on the very first game I worked - Quantum of Solace for the PS2. For that game I did a level called Opera House which was based on a location in the upcoming movie.
DESIGN
The Flat Nature of Crait
The first thought when learning about the planet Crait was unsurprisingly how flat it was. For a shooter game you pretty much always need some sort of cover and since we didn't want to ruin the aesthetic by adding cover on top of the planet surface - I had to be creative.
We knew there would be some sort of vehicle-based battle in the movie so one of the first pitches was to have the first sector (the exterior part) be vehicles only. We didn't follow through with this idea though, since we wanted to embrace the player choice and not force everyone into a vehicle.
Since I did not want to add cover on top of the planet surface, I saw no other way than to propose infantry space under the ground in the form of elaborate tunnels. The idea was accepted by everybody and I could start blocking out the space and think about how the first phase should work.
The New Walker (AT-M6)
We knew that The Last Jedi would feature a new and improved walker and we really wanted to include it in the level, but building such a massive vehicle is not a small task. We had a backup plan of only having the AT-M6's in the backdrop while playing the game versus the AT-TE's that we already had for the main game. Luckily we managed to get the AT-M6 in the game and I am very happy about that. Using the massive legs for cover, combined with the threat of it smashing you was always a key part of the design. More on that later. We also played around with the thought of making players able to control the AT-M6 but ended up focusing on other areas instead.
FIRST SECTOR