Topic: Star Wars Battlefront II

@GoldenGamer88 More like Disney gave them a call. Disney doesn't care what EA does with Star Wars, but if there's one thing they don't like, it's bad press.

Anyway, the loot boxes will be back, so this is nothing more than a temporary fix to get people to buy this game day one. Damage control. It's just unfortunate that this game will sell well regardless of the circumstances.

@DarthNocturnal Out of curiosity, given that you and I have made up the majority of posts in this thread (or least before all this controversy begun...), have you purchased the game?

A very selfish part of me hope this bombs, so that I can pick it up for £10 by years end.

@DarthNocturnal It wouldn't be until then anyways, no way Disney would allow them to return until after The Last Jedi is out. Possibly not until the movie is no longer running in theaters

I'm hearing that the campaign is really short and poorly written.

How could you sell over 10 million copies for the first game and worry about successfully monetising the sequel?
Their budgets for these are either way too high or EA are greedy buggers who care so much about large profits that they'd sell their own mothers as DLC if needs be.

@DarthNocturnal Actually, you have managed to save yourself an agreeably nice amount of discount so, it’s not a bad price for a brand new game, seeing as the prices for video games in Canada have always been unusually high, especially in comparison to the US.

I had it on pre-order by buying Gran Turismo Sport and Star Wars Battlefront II together for £75 ($60-ish CAD each), but after all this news, I got in touch with Amazon customer services and politely asked/requested if I could swap out Star Wars Battlefront II for Wolfenstein II instead, and they did.

Quite pleased I did that, as Wolfenstein II has not only surprised me, but it is one of my favourite games of the year!

Do let us know what you think of the game!

@Dezzy I’m pretty sure that because they have three separate studios (DICE, Motive and Criterion) doing two separated components for the game - the story campaign and the multiplayer - the budget is in the region of $100 million (!)

The original Star Wars Battlefront was bundled with nearly every single PlayStation 4 around the world at the time, and the game itself was available for half price - both digitally and physical copies - when The Force Awakens was on at the cinema.

And just one studio did the original game (DICE) with a little bit of external help as its release date was approaching, compared to the three studios this time round. Games are becoming more and more expensive and to me, it looks like they either had a big budget or that it was somewhat mismanaged along the way.

At the end of the day, it mostly boils down to ‘greedy company continues to be greedy’.

@IceClimbers The campaign isn't finished either. The rest of it will be released in the future, but nobody knows when... And if you don't mind spoilers; Some of it is pretty bad. You get to play as Luke in one of the levels. Which should be cool, but you're stuck in a small room defending your teammate against small bugs. They got you to play as Luke Skywalker and they chose the most boring and tedious part of the game, like what!? I've also heard that most levels just repeat the same objectives over and over again. And in the end it feels like the multiplayer, but with (pretty bad) AI and a cut-scenes in-between.

@Peek-a-boo Battlefront 2 wasn't made from scratch though. To me it looks like most assets were re-used from the first game. The engine is still the same too. Meaning that this game was a lot cheaper to develop than it seems at first glance.

@Octane I was going by what a developer on ResetEra has recently said about budgets ballooning in the past three or four years, of which he/she openly mentioned that both Destiny 2 and Star Wars Battlefront II were very close to the $100 million bracket.

Here’s a slightly out of date ‘most expensive games to develop’ list on Wikipedia: - Grand Theft Auto V cost $137 million to develop!

Motive created the story campaign, DICE worked on the multiplayer whilst Criterion did the vehicle side of things (space battles in both the single and multiplayer, for example).

Three big studios developing one game is going to be pretty costly!

@Peek-a-boo That sounds more like an issue on EA's part though. Why have three teams develop a single game? It's not as if Battlefront 2 is filled to the brim with content either...

And it's always the big greedy companies that are asking for more, in games that are going to sell 10+ million copies regardless of how well they are reviewed. Add tax evasion, and the fact that EA reports billions in revenue every year, and I wonder if all the micro-transactions are truly necessary to cover the development costs... I think they can do just fine without them.

I take a game like The Witcher 3 with a relatively small budget over something like Battlefront any day.

@Peek-a-boo

So it's 3/4 the cost of GTA5 basically.

I think that supports my point that they have an issue with their budget size.

I'd want to know why they can't make an incredibly good shooter for 50 million.

I have to congratulate Battlefield 2 for the huge amount of entertainment and Youtube videos I've been able to watch.

Although, even though its not directly related to this game, I've developed a dislike of the "Its just cosmetic" defence.

I just realized how stupid the name for this game is. Someone said they were gonna just play the original instead. Which could technically mean...any other game in this series. Does this person mean the original Star Wars Battlefront? The original Star Wars Battlefront 2? Or the original EA 2015 game called..."Star Wars Battlefront"?

Whoever decided stupid reboot naming schemes is the worst.

@kkslider5552000 It's the most stewpid idea ever. I wish people would stop doing it.

EA especially seems to be loving it lately. First there's Battlefield 1, and now there's Battlefront 1 and 2.
_{The edited word counts as profanity here, so...yeah....-Joey}

@KirbyTheVampire There's also the Xbox One. I always finding that I have to correct myself when referring to Microsoft's first home console. Just the other day I was talking to a co-woker about KotOR and told him yeah I bought an Xbox just for that game a few years ago. (Didn't realize it was BC on Xbox 360) and his replied was wow you bought an Xbox One just on the of chance that they would make that game backwards compatible. At that point I just walked away from him in fear that stupidity can be contagious.

@Tasuki I'm actually surprised that I haven't heard more confusion about the Xbox One. Such a bad idea.

I bet they've lost at least a few sales because people didn't realize it was a new Xbox. It would be almost like Sony calling the PS5 the PlayStation 1.

@KirbyTheVampire So am I especially since that seemed to happen to Nintendo with the Wii U.

@KirbyTheVampire The Xbox fanbase wasn't made up of casuals who couldn't grasp the difference between Xbox and Xbox One, or they did 10 seconds of research

@Octane I didn't say there was gonna be mass confusion, I'm just surprised that there wasn't more than there was. People certainly had that problem with the Wii U, after all. But I think that might be partially due to the fact that Nintendo always has a different name for their consoles.

Plus, MS has done a much better job with their marketing and such to make things clear to retailers and consumers. Nintendo was horrible about this with the WiiU — remember, even some journalists covering the original announcement event were still unclear whether the U was an add-on to the Wii or a new system.

Heck, MS is even managing to (successfully?) market the One-X as an entirely new system (thus in theory boosting sales) instead of what it actually is.

@the_shpydar That was a big part of it too, for sure. I bet the Wii U could have, at the very least, cleared 20K units if the marketing was as good as the marketing for the Switch.