I think I can post this here too, and I think I've got you beaten on word count.
One of the schools Ive applied to asked for basically a breakdown of a game in the sense you asked, and I wrote mine on - what else - Battlefront II (although it's written in very general terms and can be extrapolated to many other games). The ostensible thesis statement was "Write an analysis of a game you recently played and liked (or didn't like) and what you wish the makers would’ve done differently."
To preempt any incorrect analysis of "what you wish...done differently" means, it doesn't (or shouldn't) mean "different features," the idea is to describe implementation techniques or production mindsets.
Introduction
Few franchise properties have captivated the imaginations and excitement of so many different people as George Lucas's blockbuster movie saga, Star Wars. Lightsabers, X-Wings, Death Stars - these things and many others have entered a cultural iconography spanning generations.
For many people of those same generations, few leisure-time activities have defined and excited them as much as video games. It seems only natural, therefore, that Star Wars as a property is well-fitted for adaptation to electronic entertainment. Make no mistake, Star Wars (and its creators) and its success owes much to a willingness to cater to a very broad range of people - it is a multimedia empire that capitalizes (literally!) on becoming as ubiquitous as possible. It should be no surprise, then, that in video game media alone, it is a very lucrative franchise for any genre or type of game.
Among types of video games, especially in the Western audience (that same audience in which the popularity of Star Wars is centralized), few genres have been as consistently marketable as the "shooter" genre. Star Wars capitalized on this trend almost immediately after the first popular shooters became popular with its game Dark Forces. The video game publishing arm of the Star Wars empire, Lucasarts, continued its use of that franchise through the late nineties and early aughts. However, in the last years of the (90s) decade, a new type of shooter generated popular traction - the team- (and class-) based shooter. Popularized with the Tribes and Battlefield series, this sub-genre had enough mass appeal to warrant a foray by Lucasarts into the team-based shooter.
In 2004, Pandemic Studios and Lucasarts developed and produced their version of the class-based shooter. It was marketed with a focus on "play[ing] the classic Star Wars battles any way you want," a tagline that was probably derived more from the choice to make a class-based shooter than anything else - unlike the traditional first-person shooter, which often focuses on a single player or small group of players against a numerically-superior opponent, the team shooter focuses on a relatively even division of opponents. Having chosen their genre (team shooter) and their setting (Star Wars), it would have been a fairly natural progression to decide to focus on the "infantry" of this setting rather than anything specifically character-driven, and so Star Wars: Battlefront was created.
The release of the original Battlefront game was co-incident with the wrapping up of production of Star Wars Episode III, a representative of the major arm of the Star Wars media empire, its movies. Episode III was released in 2005, and later that year was marketed to the public on DVD. As mentioned above, the success of Star Wars has always depended on horizontal market penetration, and the release of a major production onto DVD provided a prime opportunity for any associated product. Having been a recent success, the Battlefront name offered a very marketable product for any video game contribution to that release opportunity. In 2005, along with the release of the aforementioned DVD, Star Wars Battlefront II was released, as another product of Pandemic Studios.
Concept
Star Wars Battlefront II is a team-based shooter based on the Star Wars franchise. Gameplay is defined by two opposing teams fighting each other (with various objectives) on self-contained "maps." The central conceit of the teams is that unlike some shooter games, where fighting units are defined by the player's selection of various items or attributes, Battlefront II has a number of different "classes" - pre-defined fighting units, from which the player may choose. Each "mission" (battle) is composed of relatively-even teams, populated by A.I. if human players are unavailable.
Several different modes of play are supported, including a "conquest" mode (control various spots on the battlefield), "capture-the-flag" mode, "assault" mode (team deathmatch), "campaign" (scripted objectives), and "galactic conquest" mode (hybrid map-management, a la strategy games, combined with standard conquest).
Goals
As mentioned in the introduction, the success of Star Wars is often due to its "broad-base" appeal. As a result, very few Star Wars games are innovative in their design, instead relying on the popular appeal of the brand name coupled with the familiar appeal of a well-established genre. While not inherently a bad thing, this changes the design focus from one that is feature-rich to one that instead chooses to polish known conceits of the genre. This is made most obvious by the name itself - Battlefront II. Battlefront II is a sequel and, by their very nature, sequels are predisposed to expand upon and polish the parts of a previous game that made it popular.
After the nebulous goal of "polishing the game" from its previous iteration, the second goal for the development team was to tie in the visual material with that of the movie being released at the same time. Since the underlying motivation here is to capitalize on familiarity, the artists had a large number of movie set pieces with rich and differing environments to draw from to help remind the player that "yes, you recognize this."
Whether these goals by themselves are too shallow is difficult to determine. As a final product, Battlefront II did not show a significant amount of innovation in terms of gameplay, nor did it show significant movements forward in visual design. However, as much as anyone wants to create a idealistically sound work of art, any marketed work also has a results-driven bottom line. In a game driven more by a focus on filling a hole in a media blitz, perhaps a minimalistic focus on merely being a sequel is wisest.
Implementation
The production time frame of the game, relative to the release date of its predecessor, had both an upside and a downside. Because of the relatively short time period between the releases of Battlefront and Battlefront II, not only was Pandemic able to reuse their Zero Engine (which they had been using in some format for more than five years), but a large portion of the original code and most of the original assets could be directly reused (should they choose to) - which helped to minimize potential backlash for any feeling of a loss of luster from the first iteration of the series to the second. The obvious downside of this is the potential for poor choices to be made as to how much of the old material should be reused: too much repetition would create the perception of a stale product.
The developers' goal of tying in the game, visually, with the new source material is the chief tool by which any feelings of a "stale product" would be addressed. Several elements - a number of unit and weapon models, along with six maps (levels) - were added to this game with zero-to-minimal changes. Two other "new" maps were added that were simply reinterpretations of maps from the previous game; they shared a number of models, textures, and other visual cues. This may show a desire on the part of the developers to maintain an artistic continuity (and the adherence to the source material necessary for a well-known franchise) from the previous version without blatant signs of duplication.
Despite re-use of some older assets, the majority of the game does reflect the developers' goal of (and some degree of success in) interweaving the visual portions of the game with the other media being released concurrently (DVDs, associated toys, etc.). Of the new visual material presented (the vast majority of which is represented by maps), seven of the ten new maps were based on new material from the recently-released movie.
The most interesting - and telling - work done on this game comes with the developers' intent to polish their earlier product (the original Battlefront game). The original Battlefront relied on breadth of art content and not breadth of gameplay to sell their game - which, all things considered, is a wise choice, as they were marketing a broadly popular intellectual property. Because familiarity was one of the keys to stoking interest, the easiest way to exude familiarity was through highly recognizable visuals. Since the gameplay itself took, at the very least, a minor backseat to developing familiar content, the end result was a product that was well-constructed, but not entirely robust or varied as far as play options went. The user was able to play through either a scripted order of "conquest" missions or he was able to pick and choose individual (also "conquest") missions to play.
Battlefront II, benefiting from having a lot of groundwork in place from its predecessor, included nearly everything present (game-play-wise) in the past iteration and worked from there. One of the most prominent code changes in the game was the addition of the ability to script different types of missions, rather than making "conquest" mode the default (and only available) option. In addition, the game allowed for scripted Lua code to be read in as any given mission was progressing (rather than only beforehand), allowing for iterative-objective missions. The result of this was several new game types added, one of which (the single-player objective-based campaign) was a significant change from the repetitive nature of the single-player offerings of its predecessor.
The other large change to the single player game, vis a vis game code, was the "galactic conquest" mode of play. This potentially represents the point at which the developers lost sight of their marked goal of simple improvement on the predecessor and allowed a little bit of feature creep. Unlike the other modes of play in the game, galactic conquest was a set of disjointed conquest missions strung together in the clothing of a strategy game. The player interface was a field of selectable planets (each of which represented a level) through which the player and an AI (or human, on the console versions of the game) could navigate. As it is, it was a relatively shallow mode of play, in that the strategy-game features were slimmed down to the bare minimum. This game mode had not only its own interface (separate from the other game modes in the user interface) and a (comparatively) novel concept, but when the script source was made available to the public, the scripts used to run this game mode revealed large portions of - at the very least, conceptual - content that was not present in the retail version of the game. It is probably a fair assumption that if the game's developers were allotted more time, they may have introduced a "deeper" version of this mode. As it stood, this portion of the game was markedly different from the other portions, and with the assumed goal of improvement on an earlier game taking prevalence over innovation, it feels like a detraction from that goal.
Changes
In moving from the merely theoretical to the wildly speculative, there are several changes any interested fan of video games or fan of the source material could suggest. However, in looking at not only time constraints shouldered by the developers but also at their seeming imperative to draw players in with the promise of familiarity, the suggestions can be boiled down to those related directly to the assumed goals of the producers.
First - the goal to release a quality product that is successful in the same vein as the game's predecessor. With the pull of a preceding successful game and the push of a time constraint working in union, the wisest thing to do here would most likely to be to make any sweeping changes a low priority. This may mean cutting the "galactic conquest" mode with the intent of focusing on other single-player modes. Many enjoyed the addition of a more engaging single-player campaign mode, but one thing that was a turn-off to many in the single-player modes was poor AI behavior. While not an option in every situation, the additional flexibility added by Luacode mid-mission scripting provides the ability to script AI behavior, for at least marginal improvements in the objective-based levels, if nowhere else. Additionally, since some levels seemed to indicate a desire to re-use visual cues but not copy assets directly over (the two aforementioned "re-interpretive" maps), this process could have been duplicated for other levels, rather than simply inserting levels from the previous game.
Secondly, there was a goal to make a familiar and recognizable product. While there is no way any production on a limited timeframe can approach the depth and breadth of an intellectual property established over the course of thirty years, it may have been prudent to spend some more time creating more things rather than more ways to play. Whenever it is after that indistinct goal that it becomes infeasible or impractical to create more art assets, more time could be spent scripting in missions - for example, an alternate campaign. Pandemic's next team shooter offering after Battlefront II was Lord of the Rings: Conquest, and it was noted for doing just that (even if it was noted for little else). While it may seem counter-intuitive to move away from expansion of the game by new ideas, in this specific case, it seems like the most apt thing the developers could have done to meet their goals was to include a greater variety of content, rather than a greater variety of concepts.
Summary
What was Battlefront II? Could it be a success? Yes, in two different ways. First, the game could have taken a solid concept (team shooter) and combined it with a well-established intellectual property (Star Wars) in a novel way(s), both referencing and branching out from its basic-but-successful predecessor. Second, the game could build directly off its predecessor and create a very familiar and easily marketable sequel. Unfortunately for the developers, it is not likely that this was a fully-realized choice. Likely given a very strict timetable, the second option seemed to be the only workable one, and insomuch as that represented the developers' goals, they did a good job meeting them, and it likely was a success for them. For the producers, it was very likely a success.
Could it have been better? Anything can be, so of course this could - although it seems like the most likely path to success would have been to take a few more steps away from the original Battlefront and show something truly new, alloted the appropriate development time. As things stood, though, the best option for increased success would have been to pinpoint the main goals going in and focus on those and only those. In this case, that would seem to have precluded doing a great deal of creative expansion and instead supports a focused content expansion.
