The fan-beloved Star Wars Battlefront games get awarded a disaster of a rerelease with Aspyr’s Battlefront Classic Collection being unplayable at launch. The collection is presently overwhelmingly negative on Steam, disappointing fans greatly who wanted to relive their nostalgia on modern platforms.
The Battlefront Classic Collection was originally announced last month in February, to the surprise of fans and the announcement received a positive reaction generally. However, expectations were completely stumbled on with the game’s release on March 14 being nothing short of disastrous. Aspyr has been facing issues for a while across the board, especially since Saber Interactive was acquired by Embracer. Aspyr was originally working on a Knights of the Old Republic Remake that was planned to be a PlayStation exclusive, however, Embracer took the project away from Aspyr and assigned it to another studio.
Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection Launched with three 64-player servers
Yes, you read that right. For a game that had around 10,000 concurrent players at launch, the game bafflingly could only support 192 players at launch. (About 2% of the concurrent players).
Aside from matchmaking issues, another incomprehensible detail about the game is its storage size. Sure, AAA companies like Activision have made gamers more than used to with gigantic game sizes, however, it feels impossible why a port of two-decade-old games has such a big cost on our storage. Do keep in mind that the collection is not a remake/remaster and is meant to be a port of the original beloved games to modern gaming platforms.
The game just suffers from major issues all around like audio bugs too which more than hinder the overall experience. This is especially discerning since Aspyr just released a remastered collection of the original Tomb Raider games which itself was generally received well.
Fans are expectedly venting their frustration online on platforms like X, while some are blaming fans for falling into the consumer hole and buying the nostalgia bait. However, this represents a larger problem with the industry in which experiences with pre-orders are generally less than ideal and there is a growing trend to forego and boycott preorders. It is obvious that consumers need to be aware of their purchases and recognize what game does or doesn’t deserve their money, but the problem can and should be tackled by studios too by not making undeliverable promises leading by and large to backlash or the inhumane crunch that game developers are made to go through.
It’s a general trend in the gaming industry to forego transparency leading to unachievable expectations set by fans which need to be tempered. While yes consumers should ideally not buy poorly performing games, it is on the studio to not inadvertently cash in on nostalgia and release a half-baked product meant to reel in cash only.
Aspyr also released a small statement on the launch of the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection which also came under fire as the statement failed to apologise or address the major issues players are facing with the collection;
We’d like to thank the Battlefront community for their overwhelming support and feedback for the STAR WARS™ Battlefront Classic Collection release.
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.
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.
Please continue to report bugs, errors, or unexpected behaviors to our support team via our Request Form
The Aspyr Team
It is hoped that Aspyr can work on the issues presented at the launch and deliver an enjoyable experience to fans who bought the collection.
In other Star Wars news, the Star Wars Mandalorian game that we previously reported on has been cancelled.
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