Feedback – did a refund for now…

[schM0ggi]

Hi,

I’m a huge fan of Star Wars. Classic Battlefront 1 / 2 are part of my childhood. I played tons of hours in singleplayer with ai and multiplayer lan with family/friends. When the Classic Collection was revealed, I had no real expectations but hopes. Hopes, that some of the biggest issues (for me) would be fixed in this re release. After trying it out I must admit… I’m disappointed.

Some general stuff:

- UI

I’m undecided. On one hand it’s nice to have an updated ui but on the other it’s clearly controller focused and lacks polish. There are no sliders in the menus (why do I need to click so much?), the map selection is one of the worst I encountered in a game like this (why do I need to click "add" instead of just clicking on the maps?). Overall, the menus could be more compact and show you more options at the same time. You know, a more mouse and keyboard friendly design.

Class selection screen is really bad and bare bone. It’s like the least amount of work was put into this. Here is your model, here is some text for the arsenal. Where is all the flavor and joy? The original games, especially Battlefront 1, had much more love and quality in that regard. And please bring the original sounds in the loading screen back!?

Okay, the next will be focused on Battlefront 2:

- AI

The ai in Battlefront 2 lacks in comparison to Battlefront 1. This can be especially observed in the pathfinding and in ship flight. No wonder ships were removed from ground maps. I don’t say the ai in Battlefront 1 is perfect by any means, but at least they could controls ships without crashing into obstacles and they even did transport you to specific locations on maps.

In Battlefront 2 we have space maps. And with space maps there are ships. A core gameplay mechanic on space maps is the infiltration of enemy ships, taking out core systems. The ai couldn’t do it back then on its own, it still can’t. They won’t transport you to the enemy ship and they won’t infiltrate and land on enemy ships. Nothing changed in that regard and that’s a big bummer. Just imagine you could escort ai troops flying over to the enemy ship in a starfighter and fighting your battle outside while they try to take the ship from the insight. Missed opportunity.

- Multiplayer

Obviously, something went wrong. Hosting a server (lan or online) caps your fps to 30. This is a tps thing as one can easily change that with the launch argument /tps xxx. But why no option in the menu? Why is this different to Battlefront 1 anyway? Back then, there was like 1 year between the two games so no doubt they share some backend. If you are already at updating the games for modern systems, why not implementing the same backend for both?

Where are dedicated server tools? Do we really need to buy the game twice (with two accounts) for running a dedicated server and playing on it?
As far as I have tested, most if not all of the old launch arguments still work. Why is there no documentation for this?

- There is something positive

One thing I hoped they would fix (especially in Battlefront 2) was ai in multiplayer. In the original, as soon as you play with ai in multiplayer (your own hosted server for instance, be it lan or online), the ai was janky and rubberbanding. The further away they were, the more this was happening, resulting in breaking immersion and just looking bad. They were lagging too, sometimes.

While testing the Classic Collection, I observed that this is actually fixed and not present anymore.

Original Battlefront 2 - > Hosting lan server with 64 (32 each team) ai players, tps 30, ai is janky
Classic Collection - > Hosting lan server with 64 (32 each team) ai players, tps 90, ai is fine

Of course, I couldn’t test with other players joining my server but it does give me some hope that work at the base has been done. And more could be done in the future.

- Verdict

I know, this is not a remaster and it is not advertised as one. But if you advertise this with “64 players in multiplayer” in a bold way, then make sure it does actually work. It obviously does not, at least online. You want 30 bucks for it, then offer some value. At the moment, I don’t see it … but I wish I could. The dlc exclusives from back then and so on are nice but I just don’t get it. This is such a huge missed opportunity. There could have been so much done. For instance, some quality of life stuff like “bring back cockpits to Battlefront 2” like mods already do, or update the ai so they are more useful in specific situations (space maps).

If you want to bring this franchise back to life and maybe get attention for a possible Battlefront 3 some time in the future, you have to do better than this. You could have been a somewhat hero for old fans by giving this franchise love with some neat additions and fixes. It's actually a no brainer. But instead… it’s a mess at the moment. Please save what can be saved. Or let Nightdive studios handle it.

I’ll see in a month or so if something changed.