Star Wars Battlefront II

The milestone is broken. 5,000 kills as one character has ramifications on the entire game and it’s already causing players to leave

A. Co Op is plagued with people menu camping, quitting when they don’t get Maul, and trying to prevent their teammates from succeeding. This is not how it’s supposed to be; it’s a toxic and unenjoyable wreck

B. Supremacy with Maul... see item “A”

C. It’s the only Maul skin in the game and for an average player, it will take 200 hours or more when you consider their success rate of actually getting Maul. The minuscule minority of players that defend it say it’s easy when they are literal gods at the game, getting 70+ kills per match as Maul AND they’re fast enough to get him every time

D. Offline players have an eternal future with this game but will never be able to get the skin. How is that fair or a decent way to treat loyal community members?

In summary: think about how it impacts the game, the players, and the community spirit, which is severely lacking right now

Tomous wrote:Does this have any kind of co-op campaign?

Infact, is the single player campaign any good?

Clocked it was on PS Plus next month.

Alvin Flummux wrote:The singleplayer campaign is alright, but very small.

Mafro wrote:

Alvin Flummux wrote:The singleplayer campaign is alright, but very small.

Do I have to have watched all episodes of Rebels and Clone Wars to fully understand it?

Alvin Flummux wrote:People who allow contact from strangers may get hate messages when they're better than them. I don't think you really want to communicate with other players in this.

Personally, I love not having to talk to, or hear, others. I'm happy to waggle my lightsaber as a truce symbol in the middle of a Heroes v Villains match.

The Case for a New Old Battlefront

The Star Wars: Battlefront franchise faces a number of problems, that must be addressed if the series is to live up to its full potential. I have come to the conclusion that the only way to resolve all of the problems satisfactorily is to split the franchise, so to speak, and follow the BF2015/Squadrons path of era exclusivity. I will explain my reasoning below.

I apologize for the length of the post, but I think it worth stating in some detail. Hopefully all the facts are in order and I don't trip over myself too much.

Problem 1: Star Wars' Growth

Star Wars is growing constantly now - new heroes, locations, designs (armor, outfits, vehicles), weapons, etc. With the advent of the Sequels and now the High Republic, and persistent rumors of an Old Republic focus for future films, multiple new eras are opening up.

Everyone has their must-have wish lists, old favorites and new, but those lists grow longer, their content more voluminous, with every passing year.

Why is this a problem? Well, let's look at the next problem...

Problem: Limited Dev Resources

DICE is a studio of considerable size, but its resources are finite. Every other year — or every other other year, depending on system release schedules and live content game popularity/longevity — the studio execs want to pop out a big new game - Battlefield, Battlefront, the very occasional risk-taker, and so on.

But we saw with BF2 that this set-up (which on paper should be a veritable money printing machine) is as flawed as the humans that comprise it, and when an hotly anticipated new game has a bad start, the bigwigs at EA lose confidence fast - the Battlefront team was siphoned off early to bolster the Battlefield team and so on.

The move made good business sense - you don't lend support to a sinking ship of bad press when you can quietly forget it and reinforce the teams making a sure-fire hit due out in just a little while. And I'm sure that EA would've had DICE drop it completely, but the license's importance and the need to keep Disney happy overrode normal business concerns, even after it became unprofitable to keep the small BF2 team going.

So Battlefront 2 kept going its content support team growing just a little over time, but Battlefield hogged DICE's resources from that point on, and if there were ever plans for a BF3, they were shelved indefinitely.

I'm unsure of DICE's internal organizational structure and how it changes over time, so forgive the assumption I'm going to make here. It just seems like whatever big unreleased game DICE is working full-time (e.g. Battlefield or Battlefront) on gets the by far the lion's share of company resources, the last big release still being supported gets a small to team to continue and wrap up the content updates, and minor resources are dedicated to the basic upkeep of earlier releases. A fair assumption? No? Yes? Maybe?

If it is, then I can only conclude that DICE is simply unable to support two franchises as huge as Battlefield *and* Battlefront at the same time, even with an alternating release schedule, without one series, the other, or both, suffering for it. Maybe the company is too small and its profit margins too slim to grow further, so it just can't manage both, or maybe it could grow but DICE and EA's accountants refuse to allow it.

I might finish up the post on the assumption that DICE will continue to be the series' developing studio, but I must note that both Battlefield and Battlefront would benefit a lot from each series being developed by a different dedicated company, though which one (if any) is beyond my ability to guess right now.

Problem: Starfighter Neglect

Supposition: If Criterion had been permitted to stick around and support BF2's starfighter modes for a year or two, or if the Battlefront team had been preserved in the state it was in at launch, then just as we saw the BF2 ground game evolve and improve with new mechanics, modes and content, so too would we have seen the same happen in the game's starfighter modes; new ships, maps and modes, improved customization, old mode overhauls. The end result might've looked a bit like Squadrons, sans campaign.

But Criterion was whisked away by EA at the earliest opportunity (standard practice for studios lending other groups a hand) - its last contribution, the TLJ map and starfighter heroes, released a couple of months after BF2's launch. With the Battlefront team much reduced in size after the early scandals, its focus needed to be on the game modes people most often played - namely, the ground-based modes. That is despite the space battles being half the fun of Star Wars.

Thus the starfighter modes withered on the vine; people grew tired of the same five maps and heroes repeating ad nauseam with no new content, and wandered off to where the new content was happening. This drove the content focus to remain on the ground modes, and that drove players to the ground modes in turn. A vicious cycle, created and perpetuated by a critical lack of dev resources, punctuated by some mode tinkering in the summer of 2019 IIRC but otherwise pretty much left alone.

And then Squadrons came out, courtesy of EA Motive; it is the Starfighter content Battlefront wishes it had got, and much more besides. It's not a huge title, more of a proof of concept rich with potential, but it does for Star Wars' starfighters what BF2015 did for the Battlefront ground battles. And that is important because it shows that such a standalone game based on starfighters can work well and doesn't need to exist within the framework of a Battlefront title to survive.

Solutions

So we have a trio of problems:

• A rapidly expanding SW universe.
• Unstable and inadequate dev resources.
• Half the fun of the franchise being neglected *just* to keep the other half ticking over.

Solution 1 - EA Motive's Squadrons shows that we can take Battlefront's starfighter-exclusive game modes, and spin them out into their own series, made by another studio.

In one fell swoop, the Battlefront devs don't need to spend resources on pretty large game modes that go unused (and won't be pestered to do so), or rely on their assisting studios to build a half of the game that the core team will be unable to support.

Without that albatross around the neck of the game, dev resources can be better allocated from day one, and players who favor ground or space battles are *both* catered to. This is great for consumers and studio accountants alike.

Disclaimer: Battlefront needs to have combined arms gameplay in its flagship game mode, and I believe that that ought to include starfighters where appropriate. It shouldn't be too hard to incorporate - in fact, jettisoning the starfighter-exclusive modes and further developing the extant flagship ground battle modes could make the OG Battlefront 2's sweeping multi-starship battles feasible.

Solution 2 - Take DICE off the Battlefront case and allow it to work on Battlefield and smaller, riskier projects that promote innovation. Hand Battlefront to another studio (though which one I couldn't guess at right now) which isn't already managing anything huge like Battlefield, and let it thrive there.

Solution 3 - Squadrons and BF2015, taken together, informs this one, and covers both the issue of universe expansion and over-stretched dev resources. I'm talking about era-specific Battlefront games.

With the SW universe expanding rapidly, no studio, even one the size of DICE, can hope to adequately represent all eras in one game any more. Neither can any studio hope to sustain a live content service that supports all of these growing eras at the same time over multiple years in a way that satisfies anyone.

The focus for each game should be narrowed, then, to just one era at a time. The devs support each title for a couple of years after launch with new content, then cycle up to the next era in line for the next release, then head back around to the start, rinse and repeat. This applies as much to Squadrons as it does Battlefront. Maybe it'll result in faster development times, particularly given the hard lessons already learned — progression, loot boxes, customization, player-preferred or popularly requested game modes, etc. — that shouldn't have to be re-learned.

This would allow eras to be more fully represented and fleshed out, heroes well beyond the top-most tier to be included, more locations to feature, more stories to be told in campaigns, shows like Mandalorian, Rebels and Clone Wars be more deeply mined for content, and so on. Additionally, it could allow greater flexibility and accuracy in some hero assignments, as they may have turned from dark to light or vice versa over time.

The Republic era is already so filled to the brim with content that it could make a Battlefront-sized game all on its own right now. The Imperial era is just as content-rich, too. The Sequel era, meanwhile, is still small relative to its predecessors, but nevertheless there is considerably more content there than any all-era Battlefront will come close to representing any time soon.

The future of the Battlefront series doesn't need to be one game each console generation that under-delivers on every era's potential and leaves fans perpetually dissatisfied.

We know what works, and we know what doesn't work. Let's put that knowledge to good use.