Every character has his or her own playstyle, and each of these varied playstyles has its own learning curve. Most importantly, it creates a delicate balance, so each character has unique strengths - as well as unique weaknesses that other heroes can exploit. The 2015 Battlefront reboot, however, makes a lot of very smart decisions in how those heroes are implemented. Battlefront 2 (developed by Pandemic back in the mid 2000s) had heros, but they were basically limited-time death machines that players with high kill counts could tap into. Star Wars Battlefront also contains a hero system where players can find power-ups that will let them play as classic characters like Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Darth Vader, and freaking Boba Fett. There’s a natural flow that creates these encounters organically, and I don’t think that was praised - or even understood - enough by critics. Every map is specifically designed to force players into encounters with the enemy, which is the entire point of multiplayer games. The old school power-up system has an arcadey feel that very few current games can re-create.Īnd the map design is unparalleled. The addition of the Jump Pack, a burstfire jetpack that allows for humongous leaps, makes terrain traversal an adrenaline-pumping thrill. Movement feels incredibly smooth, and button mapping is virtually flawless. Star Wars Battlefront remains one of the slickest, tightest, most fluid first-person shooters I’ve ever played. Personally, I would much rather play a smaller-scale game where every little detail is painstakingly designed than a massive game where the details are just excuses to add bullet points to the description the back of the box. And I think that sent the wrong message to both the gaming audience and the people who make games. I imagine Star Wars Battlefront wasn’t the game most Star Wars fanatics were hoping for - a lot of people wanted a vast single-player campaign, or a lengthy RPG set in the Star Wars universe, or maybe even an open world game.īut the way critics talked about that disappointment was by nitpicking the quantity of things in the game while ignoring how intensely polished and well-implemented those things were. I get the feeling that that most of the people who reviewed Star Wars Battlefront weren’t really interested in multiplayer shooters in the first place. I can play this stuff all day long without getting tired of it, and I would assume that’s true of many people who prefer multiplayer shooters over other game genres. (My username is froshes32.)īut I come from a very strong multiplayer shooter background. What they’re not referring to is the unquantifiable amount of strategy or skill involved in becoming a true master of its multiplayer experience, or the amount of care put into perfecting the actual game mechanics so that becoming that true master actually feels really good.Īnd this “good feeling” is something I know from firsthand experience, because I did become the true master I was talking about. Note that many of the criticisms about multiplayer’s “lack of depth” are actually referring to quantifiable depth - number of customization options, number of maps, number of weapons, number of levels in the progression hierarchy, etc. So what we ended up with was a game that was penalized - by game critics, at least - for prioritizing quality over quantity. By this I mean that the quantity of things inside a game has more weight than the quality of those things, because quantity can be, well, easily quantified, while quality is a trickier and more nuanced thing to talk about. The gaming audience is obsessed with numbers, sometimes to their own detriment.They made very little effort to clear up the cloud of misinformation that was perpetually swirling around Star Wars Battlefront. EA is bad at communicating with its customers.I don’t want to get too deep into it (that’s a topic that could fill it’s own article on its own), so I’ll just mention those briefly. There are two major facets to why I believe this game was reviewed poorly. In fact, as thoroughly as I played the overwhelmingly massive Witcher 3 (which was a masterpiece, by the way), I think Star Wars Battlefront may be responsible for stealing more of my time. #Star wars battlefront 2015 full#I did enjoy the game’s free open beta beforehand, so when the full game launched to mediocre-to-poor reviews, I wasn’t dismayed I already knew this was going to be something I’d love. I spent an embarrassing amount of time with EA’s 2015 reboot of Star Wars Battlefront.
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