On August 21 EA DICE will unveil Star Wars: Battlefront 2's Starfighter Assault mode live gameplay, but today the fun starts early with the debut of the mode's official trailer. Space battles have been one of the most requested additions to Star Wars: Battlefront since players realized EA DICE's first game wouldn't include them. Starfighter Assault is EA DICE's response, a fully-featured game mode pitting the dark and light sides of the force against each other in iconic spaceships.

The release of the trailer is coming two days early, originally planned to be published alongside the Star Wars: Battlefront 2 live footage on August 21. However, someone online must have broken embargo and published the trailer prematurely, because it has already been making the rounds. Rather than fight against the tidal wave of low quality re-uploads of the trailer, EA decided to go ahead and publish it early. If anything, it's likely to build even more hype for Monday's big Gamescom event.

The trailer features a mix of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 in-engine cinematics and gameplay, blending between the two in a way that only a game with such impressive visuals as Battlefront 2 could do. As fans expect, the Starfighter Assault mode focuses on aerial combat with no ground battle at all. Players will step into their ship of choice and go directly into battle, fighting over huge map-dependent objectives like in standard game modes.

Like with previous Star Wars: Battlefront 2 trailers, there's a heavy focus on the three different eras of Star Wars. Starfighter Assault mode will continue the trend and feature maps from Episodes 1-8. It's an impressive endeavor on EA DICE's part, considering the team will have to recreate the unique space ships and locations from each series of movies -- not an easy task. Yet the trailer shows the results of EA DICE's efforts, as some of the footage could easily have come straight from a film.

Representing the three different eras were several space battle maps, each going further back in the timeline. The first comes from the era of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and features a First Order Resurgent Star Destroyer, used in the conquest of the Unknown Regions. Next came a very quick clip of a battle within the Death Star debris above Endor, followed by a popular original trilogy comic and video game location, Fondor. Lastly comes two prequel era maps, a battle against a Trade Federation Lucrehulk Battleship above the Twi'lek homeworld of Ryloth and then an in-atmosphere battle on Kamino, where the clones were mass produced.

For a trailer with just about a minute of action, it's a lot to take in. But it's so rich in Star Wars detail that fans can pore over it for hours and likely not spot all the references.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 releases on November 17, 2017 for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.