Star Wars Battlefront

A large leak on the Battlefront 2 Reddit page has been confirmed to have been legit, and the information uncovered was [[Understatement not good]].

Basically, EA isn't taking the Ubisoft approach with Battlefront 2 (i.e. still stick with struggling multiplayer titles and keep improving their services until the community is revived) and is instead planning on recycling some more of the older material from the prior Battlefront, starting with Jabba's Palace on Tatooine. The release of Solo: A Star Wars story will have some major material released (namely, Genosis and General Grievous as a hero), but beyond that? It's fuzzy, both due to DICE having their original roadmap ruined by the urgency in needing to revamp the game due to removing loot crates, and also because of EA apparently not having much faith left in the franchise to want to support future content.

TL;DR after the release of the Solo film, Year 2 updated content for Battlefront 2 is going to be very bare-bones. And beyond that? Might not be anything at all.

edited 14th May '18 7:54:45 PM by SgtRicko

Dammit, if EA pulls that "welp, it's obviously the franchise that wont' work, time to wash our hands of it" corporate myopia bull with Star Wars, I'm going to be pissed. Especially since it means that we could very well not have Star Wars games after this one until EA's deal with Disney expires.

Man giving EA the rights to Star Wars turned into a gigantic disaster.

Its just one big clusterfuck.

edited 14th May '18 8:23:20 PM by slimcoder

Maybe, maybe not. It's been noted that most contracts have ways out; if EA thinks Star Wars games are poison, they might be willing to work with Disney to give up the contract instead of just sitting on it until it expires.

Or maybe they'll keep sitting on it, not release a single game, and then blame gamers for everything.

I think it unlikely EA will give up on Star Wars (unless Disney makes them). I think it far more likely EA will give up in Star Wars Battlefront as a franchise. EA doesn't want someone else to get the franchise. And they likely assume that the Battlefront name is poison now, so they'll turn to other Star Wars lines.

Disney has also apparently been in talks with Ubisoft and Activision about giving the license to one of them, so if EA decides to throw up their hands Disney will say "Alright, fuck you then" and likely find someone who will not only take the franchise but actually use it correctly.

Seems like they're trying to Win Back the Crowd.

edited 10th Jun '18 4:25:58 PM by Soble

Might be too little too late though.

They're not going to win anything without reinstating galactic conquest and offline multiplayer. Those were core pillars of the Battlefront experience and the new games are lackluster and repetitive without them. Not to mention, full of people who can headshot you with a sniper effortlessly from across the map even if you duck and weave. Seriously, how do people do it?

The game has a large amount of aim assist, all modern FPS do to varying degrees, they hardly need to try to do it as the computer holds their hand.

Jesus christ, someone tell me how to turn it on, I can't land a hit to save my life, and I play fps all the time.

They're probably not going to fully win back the crowd until they can adequately convince people that they won't act like freaking robber barons any more. Which, given that it's EA, might require something of an image and ethics overhaul.

It'd require me to hear news that all of the upper management in EA gave away the company to band together to leave to some remote area of the world for living out the rest of their days in solitary poverty without any sort of electronic technology.

Seriously. EA needs people who are not only businessmen but gamers as well. Phil Spencer is such a good pick for Xbox because he used to work in game development so he knows what gamers want, same with Satoru Iwata. EA and Konami are just filled with businessmen who are trying to make a profit with no thought for the company's public image.

EA did have a few semi-gamers in charge... they sadly didn't do very good of a job. Doesn't help that EA has grown to the point that sometimes, they do need to make pragmatic cuts and cancel projects that aren't panning out and risk becoming a financial black hole. A good example, despite people's opinions of late, was the recently cancelled Star Wars Visceral title. It was waaaay behind schedule, and had little to show despite being in development for some time. Remember that one scene with the guy slowly gliding his hand over the wall next to him as a Star Destroyer appeared over Tatooine? That was almost the entirety of their accomplished work at one point.

But EA has burned up all their goodwill, so everyone thinks the worst. The Visceral game is a good example. I am willing to accept the possibility that the people actually making the game had no idea what they were doing and completely screwed up. But EA is so bad that my first thought was "They must have interfered with the developers so much that they couldn't make any progress."

I mean, the reason Mass Effect: Andromeda is so screwed up is because EA made them restart development halfway through, using a new studio that wasn't familiar with the engine they were being forced to use. So just from the start, it cost twice as much as it should have.

Partially correct. Visceral was acting as a support studio for Battlefield: Hardline, in that they were the ones making the DLC maps and continuing to support the title until near the very end. They also got pulled into working on a couple of other projects, just for not as long, but apparently the EA execs understood that Visceral's staff hated being pulled all over the place and did give the project some extra development time and slack.

I think it was until they hired one of the senior developers from Uncharted that things started falling behind deadlines again. She was something of a perfectionist, wanting the character animations to be on the same quality as the Uncharted titles, but EA didn't have the tech for it, meaning they were building from scratch. The lack of progress became apparent around the time of the trailer's release, which also served as a wake-up call for her to speed up, but by then it was too late: EA decided the project was just too expensive and probably wouldn't return the profits they were pouring into it.

Kotaku did a good job covering it all - read it here if you like.

Is it safe for me to buy this game?

^ Safe in the sense you won't be fleeced into Pay To Win shenanigans. Good enough otherwise? Survey says, doubtful.

It has more content than it did at launch, and the P 2 W elements are gone.

But as for the gameplay itself, its not like the previous Battlefront title EA released: run-and-gun doesn't work as good, you're expected to aim down the sights at distances, trooper classes now exist, and you can't customize the loadout of your characters as much save for what is given to that particular class you chose. The starfighter combat on the other hand is superb, and the game's one saving grace; if there's one portion of the game that I'm certain wins over the majority of folks, its that segment alone.

If we could have the OG Battlefront ground battle mechanics, plus the NG Battlefront Space Battle segments, it would be the perfect Battlefront gmae.

But alas...

What we need is the Pandemic Battlefront's local multiplayer with bot auxiliary players, galactic conquest, etc.

Galactic conquest would be the big one that would get me to play.

An actual push and pull campaign to take over the galaxy, earn money and spend to upgrade your forces with new classes and weapons and such. Give something replayable that would be different each time based on choices and yada. You could even make it multiplayer with an admiral acting as basically a DM between battles.

Give a reason to play aside from weak progression and grinding the same multiplayer maps which kill most people's interest in FPS games with in a few days or weeks.

God, I still play old Battlefront 2.

Same. Galactic Conquest is what made that game truly interesting and replayable.