The Intro Crawl:
First off, I’m a Star Wars geek. There’s no getting around it, I was born in 1977, The Empire Strikes Back is my favorite movie, my Lego Star Wars collection has grown steadily over the past 15 months, I camped outside the Uptown theater in Washington, D.C. for a collective three weeks before the release of the sequels, the eight collector’s grade lightsabers hanging on 3D-printed hooks on my bedroom wall all but insure that my bloodline ends with me unless I find an entirely understanding lady with a similar level of fandom, and I’ve played almost every Star Wars videogame that was ever released, diving into the Star Wars universe and loving it almost every time.
There’s no excusing it, and with the exception of camping out for the prequels, I was young, didn’t know better, and it can be argued that some great moments came out of the trilogy, even if some of the dialog could have made the Pope weep.
Getting Down to It:
With that in mind, Aspyr single-handedly developed and published the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X platforms, which was released following a hefty marketing blitz on March 14th to an eager customer base that scooped it up and proceeded to throw negative reviews and refund demands en masse back in Aspyr’s face, the community citing bugs, crashes, difficulty hosting, joining, or playing online matches, and tanking reviews where version 1.0 was concerned. Aspyr, in turn, released a series of hefty patches across its platform base which seems to have resolved some of the concerns, and announced that additional patches would be forthcoming to sort everything out.
And this is in less than a week after the title went out the door.
Outside of the fact that Aspyr’s development team is probably mainlining caffeine right now to get things right, the time came to test Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection on my PlayStation 5 to see what could be made of it. Yes, the most eager player base and fans of the biggest franchise in the world felt betrayed, yes, the Internet was screaming about it like an angry parrot you decide to try to pet at a friend’s apartment and the parrot decides it really doesn’t like you, and yes, version 1.002.000 of the game is now chewing up 31.25 gigabytes of hard drive space on my console, but where does that put the game in general?
The answer: It’s not that bad, but it needs a significant amount of work.
Despite a horrible multiplayer launch that could have only existed in Aspyr’s darkest nightmares, the company has done its homework, or at least scaled up its capacity over the Saint Patrick’s Day weekend, as it was easy to hop online for quickplay or browser-based matches, it was easy to set up and host my own matches (the Battle of Hoth, anyone?), and despite the occasional host disconnecting on their end, this wasn’t that bad. The connection was good, the framerate was solid, and it was fun to hop on, try out different player classes, and try to swing the battle in your direction as you tried to snag all of the capture points and/or wipe out your opponent’s army.
Of Gameplay and Emotion:
Where single-player and split-screen gameplay is concerned, there’s a fun game to be had here, complete with the campaigns and missions you’ve loved for almost 20 years that came with the original Star Wars: Battlefront and Star Wars: Battlefront II titles. It’s easy to set the difficulty to the desired level, create a new profile, and jump into the campaign of your choice, playing as the character of your choice in the process. This says nothing about the Star Wars vehicles, which the franchise became known for, and there’s nothing that compares to stealing an enemy’s TIE Bomber, launching it, and wreaking havoc upon everything in sight to sway the battle in your favor. As promised, the overall graphics have improved from their original versions, Aspyr applying updated textures over the original title’s models and offering something that looks and sounds great and holds the same presence and power as the original, especially where John Williams’ music is concerned.
Despite the bugs, these moments still have the same power and emotional connection that players expected from the game, and Aspyr essentially firehosed the title with additional characters, content, and maps, which are fun to play through. This is still a title in which you can dive into the Star Wars universe and play on your favorite maps from the movies, and this forms a connection with the player. Yes, nostalgia’s a powerful drug, Aspyr’s offering an artisanal version of it that’s been marinating for the past 20 years, but there are some genuinely fun moments to be had here, and given the title’s current $35.01 price tag as of this writing, is not a bad deal.
“Get Some Coffee Going, It’s Time to Debug:”
Still, there are some bugs to consider, and the Internet has been screaming about them for very good reason. The game’s aim acceleration feature feels odd, and while it can be turned off, creates a strange frame rate that can throw your gameplay off, especially when you’re just trying to strafe, dodge laser fire, and accurately return fire of your own. An occasional lack of fluidity in explosions seemed apparent, debris would occasionally hover in the air after a vehicle had been destroyed, and vehicle explosions such as a Spider Tank being destroyed, seemed to fall apart awkwardly instead of collapsing as expected. From my own experience, my character would occasionally get caught in the terrain they were running on, hanging in the same place for a second or two before the game allowed them to continue moving. Perhaps the worst bug I found was in single-player gameplay, where AI-controlled characters would just stand in one place, not moving or fighting, until a trigger event finally pushed them to resume normal movement and behavior, and the severity of this bug made me wonder how it could be present in the shipped version of the game.
Improving Upon an Older Thing:
The fact of the matter is that while Aspyr, or any company, can promise the moon with an anniversary or classic collection of a beloved game, there’s only so much that can be done with underlying models that were created between 2003 and 2005. Yes, you can apply some amazing textures to them, but at the end of the day, you’re going to face the same blockiness of each character that one might expect from when games were built from the licensed Quake 3 engine. The technology just wasn’t there yet, as seen in efforts such as the Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster in 2013. There’s only so much the game’s look can improve given its underlying core elements.
If there’s something worth noting, it’s this: Aspyr set out to release this title for every major platform it could find and pulled this off, but failed to execute this well. It’s hard enough to get something out for one major platform, it took on six, and the end result felt buggy, rushed out the door, and like a quick, intentional cash grab as a result. The Internet, which is powered by a thoroughly ripped hamster on an exercise wheel and an ability to complain to a large audience with next to no effort whatsoever, inevitably shrieked its opposition to what had been delivered, and rightfully so. As such, Aspyr’s player base became their unpaid quality assurance team, something which is entirely worthy of protest. Helldivers 2, which has been burning up the charts, shipped with minimal bugs, and despite a monstrous server overload during its launch week, managed to scale up and has become an overnight success, complete with its assorted goofiness, violence, Verhoeven-level satirical horror, and the satisfaction that a freshly-launched ICBM just wiped out an inordinate number of aliens or robot automatons, gave you the warm fuzzies, and made the universe just a little bit safer.
Conclusion:
Still, Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection isn’t beyond redemption (one saving grace being that the game wasn’t steeped in the microtransaction controversy that accompanied the 2015 Star Wars: Battlefront release), and I think Aspyr realizes it, having announced a forthcoming patch to be delivered soon. This comes at a crucial moment for Aspyr, which lost out on the Knights of the Old Republic remake for Windows and PlayStation 5, and its parent company, Embracer, moving the project over to another studio. Aspyr, in turn, is under the gun to make Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection right, get the bug count down, and deliver the experience that was promised to an eager world of Star Wars fans. It wouldn’t be unheard of for a series of patches to make everything as it should be, but the uncomfortable question remains as to why this went out the door in the condition it was in the first place.
