Was there a Battlefront Cloud Car game mode planned?

The cloud car made its arrival to Battlefront via the Bespin expansion in June. However, thanks to data mining, there are indications that the security vehicle was meant to be more than just another pickup.

YouTuber clonetrooper163 recently posted a video containing lines from the Imperial announcer for the Sabotage mode. Some unused lines include:

• “Intercept those cloud cars and take the Rebels out!”
• “The Rebel strike team are in those cloud cars. Shoot them down!”
• “Destroy the Rebels escaping in those cloud cars.”
• “The Rebels are attempting to escape in stolen cloud cars! Destroy them.”

Additionally, there are few lines referencing a “commanding officer”:

• “One of our commanders has taken to the field of battle. Victory will soon be ours.”
• “A commander is joining us for this encounter. We are going to crush these Rebels.”
• “Your commanding officer has entered the field of battle. This will soon be over.”

In both cases, the above lines are just examples; there are a few more canned lines referencing cloud cars and commanding officers.

So what could these lines indicate? Well, clonetrooper163 noted that Sabotage is “is also called Hero Assault in the in the files”. This perhaps means that the Bespin-exclusive mode was originally planned to be much different.

As for the cloud car reference, I agree with Narwhal Dave in this video. It seems plausible that a third stage might’ve been planned where Rebels flying in cloud cars must help a GR-75 transport escape Bespin. This stage might’ve been axed because the developers felt that it messed with balance, took too long to complete or there just wasn’t enough development time to polish that stage.

Personally, I’m fine that Sabotage doesn’t include a ship-centric combat stage. Both the later expansion modes, Battle Station and Sabotage, include ship-to-ship combat nicely. Having three out of the four DLC modes feature ship combat might be a tad much.

Another option is that DICE planned to create a stand-alone cloud car game mode. However, considering that each DLC was to only have one mode, this seems unlikely to me.

The commanding officer lines are a bit more tricky to figure out. Perhaps DICE originally planned for one player to spawn as a buffed version of normal infantry. However, I’m not sure when that point would be, especially considering how Sabotage works now.

The fact that Sabotage is also referred to “Hero Assault” also throws a wrench into things. The name Hero Assault has a history in the Battlefront franchise as a hero deathmatch mode from Battlefront II. Sabotage is the most hero-heavy DLC mode, but perhaps it was initially meant to be more of a hero-style Blast mode.

While that possible idea never saw fruition, hero deathmatches may live on in the form of Hero Blast. That mode has been data mined in game files, but remains unofficially announced by DICE. According to data mining efforts by Uninspired Zebra, Hero Blast is meant to work like regular Blast, except that it is six-versus-six and only features heroes. While the most recent official word is that development on the mode is paused, there still is hope that we may get it eventually.

One note I’ll add is that unlike Hero Blast, I don’t think there’s a chance we’ll see the commanding officers or a cloud car mode. What clonetrooper163 dug up is almost certainly part of scrapped code.

You can listen to the unused lines in the video below. The lines referencing a commanding officer are at the beginning while the cloud car references start at the one-minute mark:

How do you think Sabotage might’ve worked if DICE included commanding officers and cloud cars? Share your thoughts below in the comments, or give SWGO a shout on Twitter or Facebook.

(Top image source. Second image source. Bottom image by Cinematic Captures. Check out their Flickr page for more awesome Battlefront screenshots.)

(H/T Narwhal Dave)