Star Wars Battlefront

The Game Room
1

Star Wars Battlefront is a reboot of the two Battlefront games of a decade ago. It’s done on the Frostbite Engine by DICE, so a similar technology to Battlefield 4. But it’s not just a Battlefield 4 star wars reskin, it feels pretty different. It’s a multiplayer only game - no single player, but there are some sort of co-op missions.

I played in the beta and have been checking out twitch streams. It’s stunningly beautiful, with fantastic use of the frostbite engine. It was clearly lovingly made with attention to detail from the star wars movies.

It seems to break the current shooter mold which is to have insanely low TTK (time to kill) designs where everyone is basically constantly dying instantly to the first person who sees them because guns are super accurate, high rate of fire, low recoil, and instantly deadly. While the TTK is not what I’d consider high, it’s way higher than something like the COD or Battlefield games. With an abundance of cover, and a sense of who is shooting at you due to blaster beams, you actually have a reasonable chance of engaging in a firefight and not just dying instantly all the time. That alone almost sells the game on me because the trend towards extremely low TTK shooters is fatiguing.

It actually seems pretty casual. No classes, no squads (only a partner system). No ammo - just overheating and recharges. It has a system whereby you can pick your 3 special abilities - things like a sniper rifle, or anti-vehicle rocket launcher, or turn your blaster rounds explosive for a few seconds, or a jetpack, or a personal shield. All of these things are on a recharge timer appropriate for their power. It actually seems to work pretty well, and obviates the need and potential imbalance of dedicated classes. For example, instead of having a sniper class you can have one of your cards be a one-shot sniper rifle you can pull out every 12 seconds or so. No killstreaks, power ups instead are scattered around the map (which incentivizes actually moving around and not hiding somewhere) and include things like orbital strikes, spawning an AT-ST, a repulsor shield big enough for your squad, or a life as one of the heroes.

There are heroes like Darth Vader, Luke, and Boba Fet each with their own special powers. In the regular modes, people get one life as them on the battlefield by finding the power ups on the map, but there’s a hero battle mode that’s like a 4v4 last man standing match where the good heroes face off with the evil ones. They’re powerful but not crazy powerful - and they attract a lot of attention so typically you’ll have everyone trying to get you killed - but it adds variety to the game when a hero shows up.

There are 9 game modes which is a pretty healthy number. I get bored to death when everyone just wants to play deathmatch over and over again - games with objectives are more interesting. Walker assault, in which the empire escorts two AT-ATs through a battlefield while the rebels try to call in bomber strikes to destroy them will probably be the main game mode, but others look interesting. Modes range from 4v4 to 20v20.

I hate Star Wars and yet the game looks beautiful and really fun. So I can imagine people who really love star wars should be super excited about the game, since it’s clearly made with loving detail towards its source material.

On PC it’s going to be an Origin exclusive, I think, although you can buy it at key sellers like GreenManGaming. It’s listed at $10 off there currently, although the purchase button is replaced with “coming soon”, so they may be out of keys.

When I get it I’ll try to figure out how to set up a clan if that’s an option. Contact me on steam or origin (preferably steam). Same name as on the boards. I’ll try to organize people to play together.

Launch trailer

E3 gameplay

2

This sounds fun. I don’t like Star Wars but I do like well-done shooters. I’ll probably pick it up. My only problem is I don’t get to play nearly as much because of school.

3

I didn’t realize there was no Single Player campaign at all. :frowning:

4

Oh man, I didn’t either.

This…complicates things

5

Oh common guys, when was the lats time a game that was primarily a multi-player shooter had any sort of decent campaign?

I have my plate full as is, but I’m on the brink of purchasing.

6

Yeah, I agree. I didn’t even bother to play the BF3 or BF4 campaigns, so whatever thousands or tens of thousands of man hours they spent on that would benefit people more if they spent that time instead developing the multiplayer.

I should mention the requirements on this game are pretty hefty - officially a 660 or 7850. That’s not from being bloated though - the game feels well optimized, it’s just stunningly beautiful and very advanced. If you ran BF4 fine I’d imagine this would run fine too.

7

Because I’m not particularly a fan of multiplayer and rather enjoy single player campaigns.

Especially for Star Wars shooter. I don’t want pick sides and play against other people who picked sides and just decided to randomly play on Hoth. I want to BE a soldier on the ACTUAL battle of Hoth, who did something heroic and was transferred to a starship who then did something to make me go to Yavin or Endor. That’s a big cliche of a storyline I know, but it let’s me play the battles I watched in the movies, not just use them as a setpiece

8

I’d love that too, but that’s not why you go to a game like Battlefront, it’s why you beg the gaming gods above for a new Dark forces or republic commando.

9

Well at least 6 of us will be getting it on launch day on PC, and I had a few other maybes. If you’re going to get it, play with us. Contact me.

10

Just a heads up: GMG isn’t going to be able to send out all the keys it sold until Thursday.

11

I found out you can’t stack the discount with their current voucher. So it’s $10 difference. I’ll just go through origin.

12

Game launches in a half hour. I’m going to stream a little bit tonight at Twitch - I’ve barely slept in 2 days so I probably won’t last too long, but come check it out, assuming the servers are working and the whole thing doesn’t collapse like a house of cards.

13

Played a few hours last night. I like it. It’s about what I expected. Stunningly beautiful, one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen. The TTK/survivability isn’t quite as high as I hoped - the smaller modes with more close-in combat tend to happen quickly, although not nearly as quickly as COD/BF style games. There’s definitely a chance to shoot back or run for cover.

The shooting mechanics/weapon variety/lack of classes is pretty casual. I do like the star card system overall - the game is much better with a one shot sniper powerup every 20 seconds than having a dedicated sniper class. And having anti-vehicle weapons on a similar cooldown means you don’t have everyone default to an engineer/anti-tank class like battlefield on some maps.

Gunning an AT-AT on those maps is definitely my favorite thing to do. Controlling a tie fighter in comparison so far is super awkward. I think they may have made the flying mechanics bad on purpose just to keep air power in check.

I’m going to try to organize people to play together sometime around 7 eastern and if we’re playing I’ll stream it, if you want to check it out.

14

I see Luke and Vader in the commercials…do they fair in the game too?

15

I’m not sure what you’re asking. There are 6 hero characters, including those two, and they all have unique powers. There’s one mode that’s geared towards the battle between the good and evil heroes that’s actually a lot of fun. They also exist as powerups in some other game modes.

I was wrong about the longer TTK, unfortunately. Two reasons, I think. I was watching streams of Walker Assault which is one of the larger maps, and TTK/survivability is naturally higher there because the combat ranges are typically longer and you also have a better idea of where the enemy is coming from so you can take more fire and be more prepared. But on the smaller maps, for smaller modes like deathmatch and escape pod, the close quarters combat and the fact that the enemy can come from more directions leads to very quick deaths.

I was also watching pre-release streams of the xbone version and underestimated how much different in aiming skill there would be. TTK is naturally longer because the xbone players are worse at hitting things. That’s the reason for the general downward trend in TTK, I think. But I don’t know why developers don’t just increase the player health on the PC version 3-5x as much to compensate for more accurate, deadly fire.

There’s also not enough content. When I heard there’d be 12 maps, I thought that was more than enough, because I was thinking about them as Battlefield maps. Battlefield 3 and 4 launched with 9-10 maps and had tons of content. But the battlefield maps are huge and varied. They would take little chunks of those maps and turn them into maps for other game modes. So you might have a big area with a little town in the middle for the 64 player conquest version of the map, but when you made a squad deathmatch version of the map, you’d set the boundaries just around the little town. It’d make it feel like there were more maps than there were, because different modes would focus on small sections of the same huge map. And you’d have those 9-10 maps for any game mode.

But in Battlefront, the maps aren’t as huge, and they’re more linear than in Battlefield. They only have 4 maps large enough for the big game modes. The rest of the maps are smaller maps designed for the smaller modes. It ends up feeling like there are a lot fewer maps than battlefield even though there are technically more. There’s definitely vastly less map acreage.

Given that they didn’t create a single player campaign, that extra manpower available should’ve resulted in more maps than a Battlefield game, not fewer. They’ll be releasing a free map in a few weeks, but it’s still not enough. The DLC is going to be needed and it will have to be ample to give the game longevity, but I’m pretty disappointed with the launch content.

They also don’t make nearly enough use of Frostbite’s excellent destruction mechanics - another area in which it feels like we’re getting shortchanged compared to Battlefield.

That said, it’s a lot of fun. The game is stunningly beautiful. The Endor maps are probably the best looking FPS maps I’ve ever seen. The game also runs magnificently - I can maintain a high, steady framerate even on ultra and I don’t detect any input lag or microstuttering or anything. It’s the best engine in the business.

16

Bought the game yesterday and after some training I played to rank 5 in the mass multiplayer game. Such fun except when I unload on a guy and they turn and one-shot me. I need better weapons!
I also played the Droid Run minigame, which is kinda fun. The addition of a task makes kills easier for me.

The one thing I could not do was the speeder bike training. I just hit tree after tree after tree! No good, but everything else is fun.

I do wish for a single player story though.

17

Game is back up on Greenmangaming for $50. Doesn’t appear to be able to stack the price with site-wide coupons, but still $10 less than origin.

18

I ordered the Darth Vader PS4 with the game from Best Buy online. I’ve been playing the 20 vs 20 multiplayer game almost exclusively since and I love it.

19

I guess I was curious if you could actually BE them, and what’s stopping people from just playing as Luke/Vader exclusively.

If they’re just power-ups or NPCs then it makes a bit more sense

20

They exist as powerups on the battlefield that give you one life as a hero of your choice, pretty much like a vehicle call-in. Or if you play heroes vs villains, it’s a last man standing match between the two sets of heroes with some regular troops to help. In that, the heroes are assigned randomly at the start of the round.