EA, owners of the rights to every Star Wars video game for the foreseeable future, decided that with Episode VII coming out, it was time to reintroduce of the most loved games in the franchise after a decade long absence.
Star Wars: Battlefront had a 'beta' come out this week. This is one of those obvious misuses of the word 'beta', as the game is only a month away from being sold in stores, and the lack of bugs and other features typical of a real beta mean that this is actually what we once called a demo.
Naturally, there has been a wave of excitement for the return of what was an excellent shooter. But, with DICE (the makers of Battlefield) creating the game, with the Frostbite engine, there were also questions over whether this would be a re-skinned Battlefield, rather than a Battlefront game. The release of the demo has ended any doubts about this. Unfortunately, it has ended them by confirming that it feels nothing like a Battlefront game, instead presenting a Battlefield with some of the complexities stripped away. The end result is not impressive.
First, the modes. You would think, given this will be the first impression of the game for many of those who are most interested in buying it, that EA would make sure that the modes they select for playing are fun and satisfactory. Instead, they've picked three modes that feel like a fun-vacuum, sucking out any temporary enjoyment you feel through mindless, frustrating and repetitive gameplay.
There is one single-player mode included. It is called Survival, and it's a typical take on horde mode. The aim is to survive six waves of enemies, increasing in number and difficulty, on a Tatooine map. Unfortunately, it is not very well thought through. You will not be able to find the randomly spawning enemies before they find you, and they will all find you at once. The size and design of the map makes everything feel empty, so when all your enemies suddenly appear without any indication of being nearby (as they don't make a sound, aren't easy to spot and don't appear on the mini-map) you can quickly feel surrounded.
Fortunately, despite the AI's unerring accuracy, they aren't very strong. Four different soldiers could be shooting and hitting you, and yet you can just sprint away with health left, wait for it to magically restore, and then pick them off one by one. Two shots will finish most of them other than the 'shock troopers', who seem to have about fifteen times the health of the regular troops. This is repeated five times across the six waves, with the sole exception being the third wave, in which there is only one enemy: an AT-ST. Defeating a vehicle in this mode will take much, much longer than it takes to defeat the troops, as you are not naturally equipped with useful against it. The grenade launcher will generally land at its feet, and doesn't do much anyway, and the ion shots are limited and also don't do a great deal.
There is one way to defeat them quickly (an AT-ST also appears in wave six) - an orbital strike - but this only appears in random pick-ups, and you may not get it at all in either wave. Thus, most of the time you spend on the map will be running around, hiding from the vehicle in a spot where you can hit it, but it can't hit you. This is not fun.
The random pick-ups come from escape pods which crash in the AT-ST waves, that you must capture and defend from the enemy. This mechanic makes the basis of the next mode, a multiplayer mode called Drop Zone. Teams of eight fight over escape pods on the Sullust map, with the first team to five winning, or if ten minutes have elapsed, the team with the most pods. It is quite rare that the matches will take the full ten minutes to complete, as one side tends to dominate proceedings. This is due to the random nature of both spawn points and, more importantly, the pods themselves.
Unlike in Survival, you will die very quickly and a lot in this mode. The pods are captured very quickly (though not as quickly as it takes to die), and then take about a minute to be 'defended', after which a point is gained. But you don't need to be near the pod to defend it. In fact, if you know your way around the map it's easier to find a hiding spot and shoot at the enemy as they sprint towards the pod. Because the winning team will have more people alive, they will find it easier to get to the next pod (which will often spawn nearer to them anyway, from my experience), capture it quickly and repeat the cycle. There is actually very little incentive to be a team player. You only need one person to do the quick capture. This leaves the remaining seven to wander around the map as they please, pretending it's a deathmatch.
Having only sixteen players particularly changes the style of play. Often there is little in the way of firefights, which have always been the main appeal of Battlefront. Instead, the design of the map leads to long-range sniping attempts, regardless of the weapon used. Should two people get up close and personal, the accuracy of the shots seems to be random, and chances are the winner will be whoever remembers there is a melee button. And once you die (which, as mentioned, will happen quickly and often once the shooting starts), it will take a long time to get back to a position where you can have an impact, whereupon you will again die.
Player numbers are not an issue in Walker Assault, another multiplayer offering and clearly something EA is fairly proud of. This is the mode they have been showing off for a number of months, in which the Empire is attacking Hoth with their AT-ATs, and the Rebels have to stop them. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem they've actually played the mode very much, because it is so imbalanced that it seems hard to believe they looked at it and thought that it would go smoothly. You would expect the Empire to have it slightly easier, given they have the walkers on their side, but the Rebels have absolutely nothing going for them. They have to do all the work, in capturing and defending satellites (in much the same way as escape pods), do this for long enough to get time to barrage the AT-ATs at the waypoint, and then do this twice more. They have to face not only the indestructible AT-ATs, but also the powerful AT-STs, TIE Fighters and TIE Interceptors, with no heavy weapons other than random-pick ups. They can control X-Wings and A-Wings, but they're really only to stop the Empire's TIEs, and the tow cables only appear in the last phase, which is nearly impossible to get right, and therefore basically can't be used in one of the most well-known parts of the series.
For the Rebels to win, it requires the entire team working together as one from the start, making sure they have as many turrets and pick-ups available at the right moment as possible, and making sure they aren't killed by Empire troops while doing all this. Basically, it's impossible. The Empire, on the other hand, can again just run around pretending it's a deathmatch. The soldiers only need to capture the satellites if the Rebels have already done it, which, as mentioned, is very quick and only takes one person. When the Empire recaptures them, they reset, which means one moment of madness can cost the Rebels minutes of satellite time, and therefore the match. The AT-ATs just plough on through, and for the most part the Rebels are helpless to stop them. The map design is also surprisingly awkward, with too many mountains creating long-distance chokepoints, and too much empty space that is presumably designed for flanking but ends up getting people lost. The Rebel base is far too easy to enter, and the random spawning is unhelpful in terms of showing the player precisely where they are positioned and where they have to go. The mass of players manages to feel like too many, because the spawns constantly cramp everyone into one third of the map based on where the walkers are, while also preventing firefights, due to the mountains and the speed of death.
There is a general lifelessness to this game that may be due to a number of different elements. The first problem is the maps. All three suffer from the same design choices. Horizontally, they are smaller than the old Battlefront maps, but they are more layered, with DICE aiming for realistic rocky mountains and hills, with small and large crevasses. What this actually does is prevent the mass firefights that Battlefront had, in which there were large sections of totally flat ground in which the two teams would have most of their players at the same time. The best strategy in this game, on the other hand, appears to be finding a good hiding spot and sniping from a distance with your weapon of choice. It doesn't really matter if you use one of the four blasters you're provided with or the unlockable rifles, as they all manage to hit from a distance regularly and with enough power to be worth it. The layered, distant maps (especially Sullust) make this a smart and easy choice.
The nature of sniping adds to the feeling that this game was designed for a first-person camera. When using third-person, which is my preference for Battlefront games and presumably the preference of most people, something feels off. Aiming seems wrong, and long distance shooting in particular becomes more random. In first-person, though, it's fairly simple. Third-person feels like an afterthought, which is galling given this is a series that was designed around a third-person view. EA promised a third-person camera, but in all their promotional material they've used a first-person view, and now we can see why. The game is designed for it, and the weapons seem to demonstrate this quite well. There are different stats for each blaster, but the differences are not readily apparent unless you really look for them. You would expect the colour and sound of the shots to be distinct for each weapon too, but there is no difference in colour (not even between teams!) and the sounds blend in with the background noise anyway.
The single most depressing part of this game, though, is a fundamental design choice which runs through every mode and every battle. It's the decision to focus on individual soldiers, rather than on the different teams. This is best exemplified by the choice to scrap classes, each of which had their own weapons and distinct design according to their roles, and replacing them with individual customisable soldiers. Imagine they had put a heavy class in the game. Suddenly, vehicles become easier to deal with for both sides. Or, if they had made a specific sniper class, that would free up the boot soldiers to have less sniper-esque weapons. But no, instead we get to choose between a number of samey weapons which function in more-or-less exactly the same way, across our many more-or-less similar soldiers with no specific role to play in the team.
This individual focus is evident in other choices too. Unlimited ammo (especially for grenades) means there is no need for planning. Just keep tossing grenades from the high ground! Insta-heal means there's no incentive to enter an unwinnable situation in order to hurt opponents so your team can finish them off later. Instead, your opponents can just hide until their health restores from 10 to 100. Your death is entirely in vain, and, again, there is less need for planning in that you don't need to know where the nearest health-droid is before you enter a tough fight. Listing only kills, deaths and points for everyone afterwards makes every match feel like a deathmatch, and mostly rewards those who think along such lines due to the way points are distributed. Helping the team earns far less points than helping yourself.
These things won't be changed in the final release, nor in any of the inevitable patches and expansions. These are clearly design choices that have been made for people who didn't play the original Battlefront games and people who aren't really into Star Wars. A weakened Battlefield with shiny skins and sounds will make EA a lot of money, but this game does not appear to be an actual Battlefront game. If they had decided to make a multiplayer Republic Commando, this game would make a lot more sense. As it is, it's ready to be profoundly disappointing.
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