Star Wars: Battlefront II is a great game from a certain point of view

I would say de facto requiring people to play “real” multiplayer to advance is rather essential for a game that builds all its long term value out of a multiplayer community.

Nobody could argue, at least not with a straight face, that PvZ GW2 was any kind of game that derived its long term value from the multiplayer community.

But Battlefront 2 doesn’t build all it’s long term value on this. It has a single player campaign with more coming, and co op play modes, and single player progression.

The online multiplayer part is literally only a third of the game.

That is smearing it on pretty thick considering Battefront 1 offered almost nothing except multiplayer. And Battefield 3, 4, 1 all had single player campaigns as well — a whopping 6 hours of experience versus dozens to hundreds of multiplayer.

This is like arguing that Titanfall 2 was built around single player.

But it sounds like they’re not “requiring” it at all. They’re allowing people to 100% opt out of the whole m/p thing via money.

I don’t have a dog in this fight because I will never buy the game to fight the Clown Troopers, but Tom’s question is a good one and from a general gaming standpoint I’m interested in your answer.

If your response is that “either EA gets its money by fostering the game’s longevity with a m/p requirement, or it gets that same money by just milking it out of people up front via paying for advancement,” that’s a defense of the business logic behind the model, not an explanation why you don’t like single-player play being eligible for advancement rewards.

…this thread is about the 2005 game right?

It’s kinda silly to say that you have to have progression to have a stable multiplayer community- in the old days you didn’t need to put in so many hours to get whatever gun or class thing you wanted, you just picked what sounds fun and played.

Love the “most popular” and “best value!” tags. They nailed it.

Why put up with the slow dribble of credits if you could just buy your way up? Before the market was turned off, Star Wars: Battlefront II allowed real-money purchases of crystals, a secondary kind of coinage that could be used to buy loot crates. A helpful shortcut, if you will, to bypass some grind. “Why would you want to actually play this game?” the system sneers. There’s an easier path to power. A Dark Side.

Suddenly I thought of a version of the game that would incorporate two layers of progression, cash-based vs. time-based. If you pay cash, you level faster and have cool tricks like Force Lightning… BUT your character model becomes uglier and uglier, and you can only wear dark, edgy clothing. If you stay noble and pure and don’t throw cash into the system, your character can obtain a higher power level. When a character from either side dies, all progress is lost. The dark siders, almost certainly more numerous than the light siders, can and will fall into infighting, whereas the virtuous light siders have friendly fire turned off. The Dark Side isn’t stronger, but it is easier, more seductive.

Players that try to use both sides would have character models wracked with indecision, and penalized by needing much more effort to gain bonuses from the newer track. If they pay enough in money or effort to overcome this penalty, they get extra temporary powers and a “redeemed” or “corrupted” tag.

Maybe it would also be a terrible game, but it would be an interesting psychological experiment, and would be thematically appropriate. I think the original plan for including Jedi in the Galaxies game was like this, except for the microtransactions.

Abso-frickin-lutely.

Yes, just because they’re more acceptable in a F2P scenario doesn’t mean they’re OK. They’re anti-consumer, they’re abhorrent, and they should be-- as Adam put it-- burned down to the ground.

Well, yes, but I’m speaking theoretically, in a world without P2W. In this specific case, if it’s P2W, it doesn’t matter, as you said.

And I didn’t say bifurcating the progression is a good idea, just a way to do it so that you don’t have this specific problem.

Don’t have the game, don’t plan on buying the game, don’t really like their progression/business model anyhow. I’m not nearly as pissed about it though because, well, it’s a business model. I would urge anyone not impressed with how they are doing this to not buy the game.

What I guess gets me a little is the idea that companies are obligated in some way to produce entertainment that meets our particular desires. They are in business to make money. While you and I and others may well believe that the choices they make suck, ultimately it’s their bean counters that have the final say. We have no moral right to any of these games, period, though I agree I’d much rather we had a financial model for them that was less rapacious.

Sidestepping the extensively discussed question of why it’s that way, this is what happens when you make your game grindy.

More to the point, that’s what players do when you make a game grindy, and base the grind primarily on playtime instead of performance. It’s super dumb that the worst performing player gets almost as many match credits as the best player.

Finally something about Star Wars: Battlefront II I can get behind!

-Tom

Hell yeah! I thought it was skill based, and that’s why I’d been getting so few credits for playing…

Funny thing, one of the problems people complain about in this game (which I don’t have) are the similar in scope to my biggest problem in the last one. Primary being it felt like others had an advantage over me which I could never narrow down to better firepower vs. better skill. Also no bots and bad, terrible, super horrible matchmaking. Putting in an accidental bullet sponge with a bunch of people who do nothing but playing BF games all day. Ohhhh the humanity!

I’m also a bullet sponge, but I certainly think I’ve noticed carded-up players having an advantage. My Vanguard ability from point blank doesn’t always seem to take them down, whereas I crumple if a bullet comes anywhere near me. ;)

Not to forget that it’s not just cards; they also have different weapons that support mods.

I’ve played 27 hours and only just unlocked my first weapon and third card slot, on an Assault. I’ve yet to get all blues, let alone one purple. And I’m not yet quite Rank 10 so can’t craft level 2.

The pre-order bonus where you got one purple per class, plus a couple purples for heroes, was an insane deal. Not all of them matter that much, though, with the possible exception of the heavy shield having more hitpoints.

I love this kind of stuff, because I think it’s fun to dismantle people attacking your system. The easy fix here is to count anyone idle who hasn’t damaged another person on the opposing team in, say, 2 minutes. Another way to catch it is to kick anyone who gets killed without leaving spawn. I can think of a few others.

This would also have other multiplayer game benefits in terms of kicking “effectively idle” players who actually aren’t playing. You could grief the game by playing and never attacking, for example.