Battlefront 2's WEIRDEST Lore

I always thought the “Clone Commander” for the officer/leader was a dev error and mostly thought they were just Clone Marine officers being transferred to 501st legion

Also the magnaguards have grenade launchers instead of melee weapons for some reason. Like, if they didn't want the magnaguards to be a melee class for a non-hero, they could have just replaced them with something else. Even just elevating the B2 battledroid to an elite class and making the default trooper a B1 with an assault rifle would have been fine. The B2 is unique enough as it is.

I think an obvious honorable mention would be the CIS having Droids get inside other Droids and operating them as vehicles. It's clearly necessary from a gameplay development POV, but it's still funny. I thought for a long time that the CIS gunship droid was a piloted vehicle until the Clone Wars Onderon episodes.

I had seen that the reason the clones look the way they do is that Pandemic had some early clone trooper concept art and was under the impression that all the clones in EpIII were going to be blue, and that the clone commander was the galactic marine. by the time they finished the game, the clones had much more work done on them in the flim

My interpretation of the Journal of the 501st was that it was always a collection of memoirs from various clone troopers in the 501st, I actually never thought about it being written by one individual; this idea is helped by the fact that they all had the same or similar enough voices, and similar enough experiences and culture, as well as the fact that it is titled "501st Journal" and not "CT-3928's / DescriptiveNickname's Journal".

A topic I would love to see is Pre-2008 Clone Wars lore. Because Clone Wars lore before the animated series was very different. I am surprised no one can made a video on this yet.

In my head I had always just assumed what remaining clones there were. Were officers mostly in non combat roles, or phase 0 Dark Troopers by the time of Hoth.

Tbh, I think the 501 journal can't be treated like a personal personal one. There is a greate example in real history in no. 303 Squadron during battle of Britan. It's diary was started by one of the pilots but was countinued durring the whole existance of the unit, even after it's creator was killed in action. The clone that was reading it could have been from the last legal clone batch, so he would be in "his" 40s

This game has so many weird little design choices that make me think the devs (and honestly the filmmakers at the time too) really didn't know what this era was specifically supposed to be like. Because this game was being developed in conjunction with Revenge of the Sith, they were probably only given a one-pager and certain film shots, limiting the devs to take what they see and extrapolate it. This explains certain stuff like the clone commander being a galactic marine, Anakin being on the dark side, etc.

The clone classes always bothered me more, since despite being the 501st, there's also the 21st Nova Corps, 7th Legion, 41st (for the scout troopers), and the purple 212th paratrooper that reminds me of 5th Fleet Security. Though presumably this was either a gameplay concession so that every class had a distinct look about them, or merely more of that movie tie-in stuff since they really wanted to show off Episode 3 and the stuff that's in it. That and the game was rushed so part of it could be a time constraint issue too, like they got to model some new stuff like the Rebel tank but didn't have enough time to make new models across the board where needed.

The V-Wing kinda came full-circle and now there's actually a ground-attack variant of it, and this is still canon under Disney. So Battlefront II's bomber V-Wing is one of the parts of non-movie lore that survived the Legends decanonisation.

My internal logic for the campaign was that there were multiple clones doing journal entries. I mean they were all clones so the voice is supposed to be the same for all clones

Victory II class frigate confused me very much as a kid. Though I never really consumed any EU media outside of a few Star Wars games I had (including the BFs), I enjoyed reading about the vehicles and things of Star Wars, and so I tried to look up this unique ship. But basically all I got was the Victory class Star Destroyer, which looked nothing like the one from BF2 and didn't even have the same classifcation. "Star Destroyer? what?" I don't remember what exactly I thought, but I feel like it was something to the effect of "Perhaps the devs made a wrong (really wrong) design for this Star Destroyer for some reason" or something. To this day I'm still confused as to just why it was named "Victory II class frigate." Like, was it meant to be a successor to Victory I Star Destroyer?

I think this this video lacks some context regarding the developement of the game and why some of the choices made by the devs make sense. And how it went. Despite the sucess of the game at the time it was a very bumpy road. And it was a stressful. LucasArts gave only 1 year of dev time. Firstly, Pandemic devs were given early ROTS concept arts and scripts from mid 2003 to late 2003. They did not have access to any 2004 stuff. hence why a lot of stuff in-game doesn't match with the final cut of the movie itself (501st's blue shade slightly lighter than compared to the movie, inaccurate galactic marine texture and mesh, Aayla Secura having two lightsabers reffering to Derek Thompson's artworks etc.) In an interview Josh Resnick, founder of Pandemic Studios noted that it was super difficult to get assets from Revenge of the Sith in order to build the related in-game assets. Secondly, regarding the campaign: the campaign is indeed crammed because a campaign was never planned for this game. It was supposed to be a multiplayer-game-only: "Another LucasArts employee remembers a particularly divisive decision made by executives for Star Wars: Battlefront II, a game that was already in danger of quality issues due to LucasArts only giving it one year of development time. “It was originally being designed as a multiplayer-only game,” this staffer recalls. “It remained that way for most of its development cycle. New people who came in after the game was in development basically said, ‘No, we’re not going to make money off of a multiplayer-only game, you have to put in a single-player campaign.’ Pandemic screamed bloody murder and said it couldn’t be done, but [LucasArts] said that they had to figure it out. Battlefront II’s producer at LucasArts basically had a breakdown bringing the game in, but the team made their deadlines and the game sold like crazy. It was probably a bad lesson for Ward to learn, because LucasArts was successful at doing something that everyone thought was impossible.” https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2015/04/04/fall-of-the-empire-how-inner-turmoil-brought-down-a-legendary-studio.aspx

Opposite of what we're talking about here, but related - something that's lore accurate but always bugged me for balance reasons was the LAAT being the only gunship with limited ammo, just because of one line about being out of rockets in AOTC.

I disagree about the importance of the story. The journal makes it clear that they knew about order 66 ahead of time. In the end, they had to betray the jedi that they had fought and died with. When the time came, they also clearly had feelings about it. They weren't mind controlled into doing it, they weren't forced to do it (at least not more than how a military normally works), and yet they did it. I also appreciated the perspective on being a stormtrooper. They just finished fighting one war, then all of a sudden there's another. I would be pissed too.

2:06 - That's because the Galactic Marines/21st Nova Corps design was originally a commander concept art. The same goes for the engineer's helmet, the heavy trooper and the jet trooper. In fact, Gree's outfit is an evolution of said piece of concept art which was repurposed for the 501st jet trooper in BF2. The 501st sharpshooter is also the concept art for the 212th airborne trooper, which during productin was part of the larger "Utapau clones". Eventually they went with the famous orange markings for the 212th and those markins with the blue stripes were instead made part of the 5th Fleet Security, except in the case of the 501st sharpshooter. This game was developed alongside the production and post-production of ROTS so lack of communication between Lucasfilm/JAK Films, Lucas Licensing, LucasArts and Pandemic meant that there would be inconsistensies between what would be shown in the film, in the novelisation of the film, the comic adaptation, the junior novelisation, the video-game adaptation, BF2, the Republic comics, the Clone Wars Adventures comics, Clone Wars (2003), Labyrinth Of Evil and other Clone Wars multimedia project material/ROTS tie-in material. ROTS' pre-production started in 2002 right after the release of AOTC and a lot of stuff would change in the different versions of the script, the cut took some time to be finalised because they shot a whole lot of material, there's at least 30 minutes of deleted scenes that we have seen, plus a number of other deleted scenes we haven't seen yet, or deleted scenes that we have only seen in the ROTS tie-in material, such as the game, the novel and the comic. A number of the unused clone concepts from the pre-production/production of the film were repurposed for other projects like BF2, the ROTS game, the Republic comics, the ROTS LEGO line and Hasbro's ROTS line as well.

For me it was just too show all the different Clone Armors from Episode 3. And Pandemic used the coolest looking ones for the classes.

Actually the aging thing probably wasent talked about much when the story was drawn up. In episode 2 it was only said they had an accelerated GROWTH rate not they age twice as fast. So the oldest clones in the 501st would biologically 45 in this.

I know its weird, but I've always had a soft spot for the Victory II Frigate. Probably some bias there since I played a lot of BF2 as a kid, but even now I really like the design -- probably one of the best non-movie frigate designs imo. The 'sword' shape it has looks really cool, and I'm particularly fond of the bridge design. It still evokes an imperial aesthetic but the fact its much closer to the hull almost helps to fix the common criticism of Imperial vessels always making their bridge big targets. I wish it was used more in the star wars EU but I can understand why its only made a few scant appearances outside of BF2.