Star Wars Armada: What Episode IX Might Bring To The Game
Let’s take a look at what Episode IX might have to offer Star Wars Armada.
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker is less than a month and a half away, and people are starting to get excited. While the movie has already been hyped a lot, the most recent trailer upped the anti, showing off what appears to be some massive space battles (something rather lacking in the new trilogy so far). Given what shown in the trailer its fair to ask what the movie could mean for my beloved Star Wars Armada, and if we might get any new ships. Lets take a look.
Old Classics Return
The trailer showed off a couple shots of massive battles, and large fleets. The most iconic one so far is pictured above showing off a large Resistance/Rebel fleet gathering. This feel is a really massive collection of ships and kind of boggles the mind to look at. There is a huge variety of ships on display here. Luckily several sites and individuals have done breakdowns of what we are looking at. You can find a few, here, here and here. While its impossible to ID every ship show, there are a lot of classics there. It seems like ships from every Star Wars era and every movie and TV show are crammed together (almost like some grabbed a ton of existing visual assets and slammed them together for a cool trailer shot…). This picture is vertible who’s who of old and classic ships brought back for the end of the Skywalker saga.
The Sith?/First Order?/Empire? fleet on the other hand seems to be exclusively made up of a classic ISD Is, a ship that was already outdated at the time of the original trilogy. This ship is classic, iconic and beautiful but its nothing new. I suppose its fitting to have both ISD Is and a CR-90 (one shown early in the trailer is painted as the Tantive IV though I how no idea how that would be possible), the first ships ever shown in a Star Wars movie both around for the end of the saga.
New Ships?
What’s not on display are any really new ships. With the exception of a new version of the TIE fighter shown the bad guys fleet seems entirely made up existing ships, most of them old classics.The one possible exception seems to a shot of an ISD I with a modified heavy cannon on its belly. On the Rebels side they also seem to mostly be using old ships, with maybe a few updated versions of fighters. The picture of the Rebel fleet does seem to show some modified versions of old ships, and possibly some new designed, but it’s so jumbled and rushed that it is hard to make any in particular out. If there are new designs there they seem to exist only as background dressing and at least so far haven’t really been featured in anyway (though that hasn’t stopped Star Wars from building up background ships before). Contrast this with the Last Jedi, which despite failings, introduced a number of new ships for both sides.
Anything New For Armada?
All this means there doesn’t seem to be, from what we know, a whole ton of fodder in movie for new Armada ships. So far FFG hasn’t gone into the sequels at all, and none of the new ships in The Force Awakens or the Last Jedi have gotten added to the game yet either. FFG has inched a little in that direction with the upcoming Starhawk, a New Republic ship from the new cannon, but its not quite Resistance yet. In addition, since they’ve announced that Clone Wars expansions are coming I’d expect a lot of their energy is focused in that direction right now. Even if it doesn’t give a lot of new fodder to the game, it does cement the idea that both the Resistance and First Order still used older classic ships, so if those factions where added, FFG could use a lot of the existing line to bulk them out. Overall I just want more Armada content, so anything they do will make me happy!
