Battlefront II - EA and DICE versus the Dark Side

bots yet?

Just about time to announce Star Wars: Battlefront III.

Totally without loot crates. But you can buy midochlorian boosts for only $19.95 to make you invulnerable for 5 games.

It’s had a bots all along, just not for the epic battlefield modes. But you can run deathmatches against bots to your hearts content!

-Tom

Not for the large battlefields? That’s what I’d want them for because playing this against real humans isn’t very fun when you’re constantly insta-gibbed.

On sale for $4.49. Finally buying this one for the single-player.

Was the single player any good, I never bothered with it.

Not really. I mean, it’s the best single player Star Wars first-person shooter experience that came out last year.

Some people said it was better than The Force Unleashed one and two!

It’s a bit more than twice as expensive in Europe /grumble

Thanks god there are free and easy to use vpn at this point. Bought with a bit of spare money I had on Paypal. I read apart from the sp campaign, it also has 20 mp maps and bots, so at least it has content…

It’s not a terrible campaign. It just doesnt land any of the emotional hit it’s going for.

In other words, an Electronic Arts game.

-Tom

Battlefront II is also available now through the EA Access vault if you have that subscription ($5/month, $30/year)

For now it is kind of decent… I mean, the story and characters. I liked the situation of the story, just at the end of Return of Jedi with a empire soldier that doesn’t know what to do anymore, I liked the intro of the heroine, extracting from a rebel ship in a badass way, I liked the part with Luke and how it showed how one of her men is starting to doubt in the cause…

I have more problems with the gameplay. I wouldn’t even classify this is a shooter, it’s a shooting gallery.
-No ammo management (they have infinite ammo with the heat system)
-No weapon management (you can only use a single main weapon)
-No health management (health regeneration)
-No exploration, levels are too linear for that, there is no backtracking, no other elements like puzzles.
-No emphasis on movement, the difficulty, enemy spawn, weapon accuracy and game design is tweaked in a way that is better to stay behind cover and ping enemies at mid range. I tried a few times to get the scifi shotgun and stay in close range after some tries it was clear it isn’t designed for it.

So if you don’t have any of that, what is left? The shooting. Therefore, shooting gallery.

Yeah, same here. I played the campaign as part of the 10 hour demo you get as part of EA Access, but I didn’t end up playing even 3 of the 10 hours because I got so bored with the gameplay in the campaign. The story did seem intriguing, but the gameplay, level design, weapon design, etc just made the moment-to-moment play of the campaign pretty plain. It’s like the opposite of the Destiny games, where the moment-to-moment gameplay is excellent, but the story is plain and boring. I clearly prefer the latter combination more than the former.

Well there’s flying a TIE fighter and an X-wing.

These parts were admittedly pretty cool and made me long for a Tie Fighter 2. If one day I’m a billionaire, I will do it goddamnit.

Sorry, @TurinTur, but Tie Fighters aren’t real. Even billionaires can’t fly them. Star Wars is a fictional story.

Finished the campaign, including the free dlc they released after release.

It has a pair of good set pieces, and they have mostly their heart in the right place, you can see how they tried to make a Star Wars story of redemption, hope, betrayal and family. It doesn’t work because it isn’t properly done, of course, instead of putting fanservice (a level where you play Leia! another where you play Lando! another where you play Han solo!), they should have focused 100% on the main character, having then more time with the main character would mean:
-do a better job with the setup of the inferno squad and how close they are, her, Hask and Del; that way when they later break up it would be tragic.
-it would help having more time for the main character to turn coat, instead of being done in 10 minutes, it should have been done little by little in several missions.
-Making a better setup with the relationship between her and her dad, the last cutscene where his tragic fate is decided doesn’t really work because of that.

It’s like professional writers don’t know you have to invest in setup first to have a proper payoff later.

And the multiplayer? Mostly dogshit! Or at least the main mode which at this point is where most people plays. Why? IT’S A GIANT MEATGRINDER THAT’S WHY.
No, really. I don’t know how the hell a company invest so much resources in doing an expensive game like this, and when 95% of the job is done, they fail in the remaining 5%, the proper balance and adjustment of the game flow, the design of the main game mode. They just throw 40 player to one or two points the maps, which a good number of them are also designed with lots of chokepoints. The result? Meatgrinder central.
There are some modes that are more decent, as the game have several, but they are definitively much less people playing them, sometimes you need to wait a while to find a match.

I also find funny how weapons are all super accurate… in a Star Wars game of all things. I thought their intention was to do a more casual game than BF? Because what it happens is that everyone headshots each other and as results the TTK is shorter what it should be.

I always thought Battlefront games were designed as meatgrinders in multiplayer on purpose? That way people get lots of kills and then get to be their designated Star Wars Hero.

Then… they should just play one of the modes where they can choose their favorite Hero, directly, without any grinding?
Also, you don’t really obtain lots of points in meatgrinders, you die as much as you kill.