JediExile said:
So I actually just played the new Battlefront for 4 hours.
I just want to get this out of the way: flying is absolutely garbage. I have no idea how they shipped out this game with these ship controls and thought it was okay. Moving the ships around is an incredible struggle in both the first and third person modes. I’m actually more glad than angry that space battles aren’t in this game anymore, they would have been absolute shit.
The spawning system is also a joke. From what I understand, you have a partner. I’m not sure if you can choose one or not, but it doesn’t really matter. This one partner is your spawn point and that’s about it. Compare that to the control points acting as spawn points in BF1 + 2 and it’s really bad. Spawning is also instant aside from being forced to watch the kill cams. There’s only about 2 instances where I had to wait maybe 3 seconds to spawn and I’m not sure why.
The removal of the class system was a huge mistake. The replacement card system is awkward and the grind to get better cards is just an absolute chore. Having a selection of weapons is okay, but in the end they feel really similar to each other in regards to how they all handle and sound. The balancing of these weapons is kind of a joke to. There’s this heavy blaster called the RT-97C. The statistics in game show it to be a straight upgrade to the DLT-19 so I used it and it’s actually worse than the DLT-19 for some reason despite having a faster RoF and longer range(?). I’m not even sure why this is, all I know is when I used the weapon I was missing an incredible amount of shots I would have gotten with the DLT-19. There are also higher rank weapons which killed me a lot faster than my lower level weapons that I don’t know the name of.
Maps are surprisingly boring to play on. I think this partially has to do with the removal of the class system and the worse spawning system, but I’m not sure. There are really only 4 or so maps with Endor and I believe Hoth being split up to provide some sort of false sense of variety. Hoth played the best for me with the well spaced cover, the open spaces with trenches, and the decent spawning for Supremacy(?). Endor and Sullust(?) are pretty to look at, but that’s about it. The odd placement of control points of Sullust along with the awkwardly placed cover made it somewhat a chore to play and Endor was incredibly disorienting for me to fight on with the overwhelming detail and very tight spawning. Tatooine was boring and I’m disappointed at all of the maps for not doing anything cool like Battlefront 1 and 2 did with the hostile planet NPCs (Sand People for BF1 and Gamorrean warriors for BF2), friendly planet NPCs (Gungans on Naboo and the fucking Ewoks on Endor), neutral NPCs (Jawas on Tatooine), or environmental dangers (traps for vehicles on Endor, bridges on Mustafar). It’s such a waste of good potential, it really bothers me.
I also have a huge problem with the Heroes. The first issue I noticed was that Luke Skywalker’s voice actor is absolutely terrible. Shockingly bad. It physically pains me to listen to this. Second, Heroes are balanced horribly. Instead of giving them a timer, slightly more health, enhanced agility, and unique abilities they really just decided to make them have an insane amount of health, lock-on abilites, and make them all slow as fuck. In BF2, I remember being able to take down a Hero alone if they were mediocre and I knew how to use my class properly. Now it feels like the most you can do to fight a hero is grab a bunch of pals and spray. It’s really not fun. The third thing I noticed is that Greedo and Nien Nunb as heroes are hilarious, absolutely hilarious. It’s kind of hard to tell them apart from some Rebel skins sometimes because in they end they’re just background characters in the movies and don’t stand out (people would argue Greedo stands out, but I’d argue back that there’s nothing actually special about him. Only the “Who shot first?” shit makes him special, other than that he’s a character who only lived and died to characterize Han better).
So overall it’s a game that looks incredible, runs even better, but plays horribly. I wouldn’t really even consider buying it for the price it’s at now ($24). Maybe for 15 dollars I’d buy the base game and I’m not sure how much I’d spend for the season pass.
Pretty much sums it up exactly.
I dunno if you play on PC, or with a gamepad, but mouse and keyboard flying is absolute shit. Just. Total crap. Worse than the flight controls in GTAV, and I know flight can be done well because I was a goddamn wizard with the choppers in Battlefield 3 and 4 (also made by DICE. What?). And if you do use a gamepad and the flying is still awful, then I’m blown away. Space would be utterly unplayable in this game.
The spawns are indeed shit as well. You get the choice of your partner (which is decent if you’re in a group, but you only get one? What? Not a squad?) or a completely random spawn which is almost ALWAYS miles away from the action which means you get to run for about two minutes before someone at max level picks you off with a pulse rifle shot.
The card system is inane. Why cards? Why is that cool to do right now? The game would be objectively better if, instead of earning a “card” for the jump pack, you just earned the fucking jump pack. It’s the same damn thing, just one makes sense in the universe and the other is a… deck of cards? It’s stupid. Plus there are cards in the game at higher levels that just make your character more powerful at base, which is completely baffling and bullshit.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the powerups in concert with this. I get that there were powerups in Battlefront 1 and 2, but it’s 2016 now. I’m playing a Rebel trooper and I see an AT-ST bearing down on us, ripping us apart and I go for the powerup to get a rocket launcher to take it out… only the random powerup is a probe droid. Great. (This example would be better if the AT-STs weren’t made of paper). I would have been okay with the loss of classes as a thing if they had just given us the ability to build loadouts to replicate classes, but as it is, you just get a blaster and a deck of cards, one of which you have to pick up charges to use.
I felt like the maps were the strong point of the game, but with so few of them, they do become very samey very quickly after a couple of rounds, especially if you’re only playing one game mode (there’s about one map per environment per game mode, but you’ll never see them all if you just want to play one mode).
The heroes are pretty much a joke, yes. To the point where if one is close and has seen me I just stop playing because there’s nothing you can do but die instantly. They’re fun to play as, just running around and destroying players, and there’s a decent amount of strategy involved in playing each “class” of hero intelligently, but they completely unbalance the game.
People (myself included) were worried that the game would just be Battlefield with a Star Wars skin, but after playing the game I wish it had been, because this is somewhere between Battlefield and Battlefront, but not in a good way. It’s just a horrible, malformed child of the two franchises.
That said, I hop in and play a few rounds now and then to scratch that itch. The first couple of rounds are a beautiful experience, everything sounds (their sound designer posts blogs on their site now and then about how much intense care went into mixing each sound to fit the galaxy with Soundcloud examples of each layer of the ambience, and they’re amazing to read) and looks and feels spot-on Star Wars to me. About four rounds in, the ugliness starts to show through the cracks and I have to quit before I get angry at the game. It’s a classic Star Wars video game story: “There was so much potential there, but… they dropped the ball somewhere along the line.”
