Port-o-remaster publishers Aspyr yesterday launched the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, bundling together the two ‘What if Battlefield but Star Wars?’ shooters originally released by Pandemic Studios and LucasArts in 2004 and 2005 (not to be confused with Dice and EA’s uncolonic Star Wars Battlefront games from the mid-tensies). It’s one of those rereleases that exists mostly for consoles which never saw the games in the first place, made a bit useless on PC by the fact that you can still buy and fully play the originals for half the price. It’s made even less useful by launching in a right wonky technical state, with bad lag, crashes, and reportedly only three 64-player servers online at first.
STAR WARS™ Battlefront Classic Collection – Launch Trailer“At launch, we experienced critical errors with our network infrastructure. The result was incredibly high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser,” Aspyr explained a post. “Since launch, we’ve been working to address these issues and increase network stability, and we will continue our efforts until our network infrastructure is stabilized to prevent further outages.”
Players are understandably not super pleased with all this. It’s currently sitting with an ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ player rating on Steam, with only 19% of the 4202 player reviews giving it a thumbs-up. Along with the technical issues, some players are unhappy with changes to controls, menus, and more. The Collection also breaks some mods.
“Asides from all the issues mentioned by all the players, this repack breaks most mods for PC due to changes in the file system that to me, make no sense, since the game is as buggy as the previous version or worse,” said modder Harrisonfog of the Battlefront 2 Remaster project. “It’s not better, and the new functions like splitscreen barely work. As a modder who has worked on a big mod project for this game for years, I find this release pitiful to say the least, and it’s a shame that we modders were not consulted as they were for the Tomb Raider Remaster which gave great results for that particular release.”
In lieu of apologising for the launch issues, Aspyr took the opportunity to thank people for telling them that this sucks. “We’d like to thank the Battlefront community for their overwhelming support and feedback for the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection release,” they said. I remain fascinated by the ongoing evolution of marketing language and emotional approaches to dealing with narked customers.
If you want, you can buy the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection for £29/€34/$35 on Steam. It’s also on Nintendo Switch, PlayStations 4 and 5, and Xboxes One and Xeries XS.
Alternatively, you can still buy and play the originals for £8.50 apiece. While they did lose official multiplayer support for several years after GameSpy died, making players rely on external tools like GameRanger, multiplayer was re-added to the versions on Steam and GOG a few years back (2017 for BF2, 2020 for the first). It is some small mercy that the originals haven’t been pulled from sale. Too many remasters and rereleases that are worse than the originals have become the only way the games are sold now, such as the rubbish GTA trilogy.
We liked the original Battlefront enough to declare it one of the games worth saving from 2004.
The main benefits of the new collection seem to be: 1) a fresh injection of new players lured in by the release; 2) Hero Assault mode is on more maps; 3) access to a handful of Xbox-exclusive maps and characters, including the wizard Kit Fisto. I mean, maybe it is worth £12 to play as someone named Kit Fisto.