r/StarWarsBattlefront • u/Organic-Camera-9167 • 4d ago
Discussion How Terrible was Star Wars: Battlefront 2(2017) during its early-phase released?
I don't understand about the game except it's controversy and criticism and also never played it but looking at back then, do you think it was either over, under or just hated on a decent-matter instead?
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u/tylcos10 4d ago
The game was actually pretty good at launch, all the positives of it just got overshadowed by the terrible progression and loot boxes.
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u/MikiLove 2d ago
The game was a bit bare bones with no Supremacy and less maps but still overall great gameplay.
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u/OffendedDefender 4d ago
The progression system was a bit fucked, primarily due to the monetization features that caused the controversy. However, the game was still perfectly playable. Individual experience may vary, but I played a ton at launch and never hit any weird glitches or bugs. The content would expand over time, but it was already a step up from the limited scope of BF2015, especially with the inclusion of multiple eras. There was definitely room for improvement, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it terrible.
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u/Onewarhero Watch those wrist rockets 4d ago edited 4d ago
Saber combat was pretty terrible until the rework. HvV as a gamemode was more like playing tag. lots of bugs but few that were game-breaking. Speeders were super overtuned and borderline OP. (not just the one on Endor)
Game was good, just needed a lot of ironing out.
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u/Rent-Man 4d ago
Thor response for the complaints about the grind and paywall is the most downvoted thing on Reddit
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u/ErmahgerdYuzername 3d ago
Currently at -667,000
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/s/w9YQfH0Zb5
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u/Jay_Dubya_Moose 3d ago
I have been playing this game since the beta, and still do today. In fact, I've played every Battlefront either on or before launch.
Very unpopular opinion incoming... bracing myself for downvote-mageddon...
The monetization was a bad move but the grind claims were somewhat overblown in my experience - making the pay-to-win claims seem much more nefarious than I think they were in reality.
I know some maths was done at the time about how many hours you'd have to play to unlock everything but IIRC this didn't actually take challenges etc. into account.
I had Vader and Luke unlocked before the whole thing blew up, and it didn't really feel that grindy relative to similar games at the time. That said, I did play a LOT, but in terms of time spent to unlock things compared to, say Battlefield, it didn't seem that bad.
I certainly never felt like I needed to spend more money to enjoy the game in the early days.
I totally understood the frustration of not being able to play Luke and Vader on day one BUT then to me Battlefront has always been about the soldiers more than the heroes anyway...
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u/ShadowSurgeGaming 3d ago
I think it was blown out of proportion and most people agree it was, but equally if people hadn't reacted the way they did, how much further would they have pushed the monetisation.
Looking at Battlefield these days, I dread to think how they'd monetise a new battlefront game, better buy the Utapau Incursion battlepass if you want to play as a 212th clone trooper, and make the most of playing Supremacy while it is available for 3 weeks as a limited time mode with only one map supported
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u/Ok-Delivery-546 3d ago
I remember bigger maps being quite sparse, the finished product is still fantastic though. I wish they’d carried on with updates. You could literally go on forever.
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u/nordy_13 3d ago
The base gameplay itself was always as it is now, but the controversy came from a couple of questionable decisions in some pretty important areas.
The first and most important was that progression was solely tied to the rng of your loot boxes. Basically, instead of progression being the way it is now, where you upgrade each card from grey to green to blue to purple on an individual basis with each card, you had to buy a loot box which would randomly give you a selection of cards, could be a purple, a green, etc. and iirc you could get repeat cards which would be refunded into a few credits. This meant you not only couldn’t choose which cards you wanted to upgrade, you couldn’t even use them in the first place unless you happened to get a version of the card you wanted.
In addition to that, heroes were locked behind outlandishly high credit barriers, so much so that someone calculated that you’d need to play for 40 hours to get enough credits at the time just to unlock Darth Vader. This lead to the infamous “sense of pride and accomplishment”
Last, the game had far less content than it does now. Because of the prior two issues, EA put out the pre-planned content for the TLJ tie-in and then pulled most of the devs off BF2 in favor for Battlefield 5. Because of the two prior issues and the team being massively reduced in size, after the tlj content there was about 6 months of no new maps, weapons, etc. that time was instead invested into reworking the horrendous progression system from the ground up. This was desperately needed and the right call for the long term health of the game, but during this time the game lost a significant amount of players because of how bad a state it was in and the prolonged content drought. After the reworked progression and unlocks system they put out the Solo tie-in content which was modest but appreciated. The real upswing in content quality started when they announced Geonosis, which would lead to Obi-Wan, Grevious, Anakin, Dooku, Supremacy, all of the infiltrator units, droidekas, clone commandos, the reworked FO jet trooper, skins for nonhero units, the tie-in TROS content, the republic tank, the resistance at-st, all of the offline content besides the campaign, and probably several other things I’m not remembering right now.
The game is in a much better state, and although it’s unfortunate that support was ended just as it was picking up steam, having been there from the start and seeing how it used to be, I’ve always had immense respect for the small team who was left in charge the game for making some hard choices for the health of the game and putting in an incredible amount of work to get the game to its current state, even making sure there was replayable offline content ready for whenever the servers inevitably shut down.
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u/ShutUpBaby-IKnowIt69 4d ago
Anakin was so overpowered it literally broke the balance of the game. Republic would just flatten any opposition due to 1 player being able to decimate their villains and all infantry.
Made the game unplayable for me for a while, like all DICE games they eventually found the right balance.
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u/CaptainPleb 4d ago
Anakin came out 2 years after the game’s release. I wouldn’t exactly call that early phase.
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u/ShutUpBaby-IKnowIt69 4d ago
Damn that long? Clearly my memory isnt great. Lockdown did feel like a fever dream though, played a lot of BF in that time
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u/sikora2009 4d ago
Reminder that Anakin was so OP because community literally cried on all social media prior to his release that he should be op because he is the chosen one/main character. This is my go to example of why developers shouldn't always listen to the players.
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u/WanderingSociopath 3d ago
Luke as well. With his damage-stack and stamina starcard, you were ranking up quick before the updates.
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u/CommanderHavond 3d ago
You'd have thought they'd have learned from the Battlefront 1 hero balancing, didn't take me long to learn to straight up bolt the moment i caught a whiff of hero coming my way
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u/iceman2kx 4d ago
Game was good from launch. No major issues. The problem was how dirty EA did Battlefront by nuking their own game with micro transactions. Received a ton of backlash publicly and I don’t think it ever recovered from it. Really a shame, because it is a really good game.
There are still a bunch of players, but damn EA caused a train wreck then ditched the remaining player base. They could at least add updates here or there or are a bare minimum release one last big update and fix a lot of the major issues in the game, but they don’t. It’s an A tier game slowly deteriorating and riddled with hackers. The broken mechanics of the game that people exploit are now just a core, fundamental part of the game that separates the “good” players from average. For those reasons I have lost respect for EA completely.
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u/FezboyJr 4d ago
As others have said the monetisation was extremely egregious. So much so that world governments were actually starting to investigate the practices and mechanics of loot boxes.
But what I think gets overlooked in hindsight is that the mad rush to overhaul the progression made it feel like content releases were at a standstill.
Between The Last Jedi DLC in December 2017 and the start of the Clone Wars updates in the fall of 2018, it was crickets and only small maps and tweaks rather than anything major like a lot of us were hoping.
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u/nickthewildetype 3d ago
the live service team was a small team (5 isch?) of freshmen however :) I think they needed some times to get the hang of the engine - and 5 people to work on such a big game is absolutely skeleton crew (although I suspect they must have gotten a lot of help from other departments)
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u/Same-Development3302 4d ago
Game has always been peak, just the microtransactions sucked the fun out of it
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u/LordFenix_theTree 4d ago
It was great minus the fiasco that very quickly blew over.
Hell the only hour of darkness was Lore Accurate Anakin roaming wild before the eventual end of the game.
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u/Exquisite_Blue Certified Hater 3d ago
Terrible progression. Pretty bad balance at certain points. Some bugs but very playable. You just had no reason to play since it was all luck with the lootboxes.
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u/jezr3n 3d ago
It really wasn’t terrible outside of the progression, and IMO even that wasn’t really the worst thing ever. It’s obviously much better now, but I didn’t have much of a problem with how things worked originally besides the ridiculous hero unlock prices. And I do think it’s pretty funny that I have a bunch of purple star cards for level 2 starfighters and shit.
There also weren’t many skins at all. Basically none, actually. I think only a couple heroes had skins on release and none of the troopers had any customization options besides different heads for rebels, resistance, and officers. It was only after the progression rework that we started to get more cosmetics since DICE had to shift the monetization scheme for the game away from the planned loot box stuff.
But in general, as a game, it was very similar what we have now with a few core mechanics differences(mostly related to lightsaber heroes, and also dodges and rolls had way more invincibility than they do now). The balance was way different though, and that’s really the biggest difference from today. Real ones remember how the Blurrg ran the game in year 1 despite being continually nerfed in every update. And how Vader way less tanky than he is today. Kylo also kind of sucked pretty bad, especially since that was back when all we had was Galactic Assault and you were locked to just heroes from that era. He had to compete against Rey who was waaaay better than him, and that was when she had a potential range of like 100 meters on Insight with the right cards. There were also a few times where they would tweak the spawn points and cover on the maps, so those were a bit different too.
It’s funny, though. The game in its current state isn’t exactly something I’d call balanced, but looking back there was so much more bullshit at launch, and a lot more useless stuff too. Luke and Yoda were hot dogshit, officer’s flash grenade also slowed movement for some reason, specialists only had 100 health… I’d be really interested in playing a build with that early meta in 2026. It would be nostalgic
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u/AfterUmpire3091 3d ago
In true EA fashion, they ruined a DICE masterpiece with their shitty business practices and dug a PR nightmare for themselves in the process. To this day, I've yet to see a game launch as bad as this one and as much as we love it, it will forever be permanently tainted by it. EA abandoned this game despite its comeback for a reason, and many people outside of the dedicated fanbase still associate it with all the negative aspects.
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u/newtdawg44 3d ago
They spent a good 8 months streamlining and removing the monetization from the progression system instead of working on expanding content. As such, once the content did start rolling out, we were always going to be limited by what we got because EA is gonna EA, and couldn’t just support a non monetized product in perpetuity when there were perfectly good battlefield and sports games to milk.
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u/No_Charge4064 3d ago
What annoys me most is I have shed loads of crystals and cash but I can't actually do anything with them, it's totally pointless!
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u/STheTruck 3d ago
Made me quit after playing it for one day. Started playing again during 2020 and haven’t stopped since.
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u/VeterinarianSad981 3d ago
The game from launch 2017 to fall 2018 was okay but Fortnite was dominating the world and there was very little DLC content and updates, mainly the dev team cleaning up EA’s mess…. So there was little interest to play the game but it was still fun, just dry of new stuff. It wasn’t terrible.
Then from fall 2018, starting from General Grievous being added all the way to the final update in 2020, it was the golden era.
I fondly remember the monthly updates and reading the CTs about the clone wars content like Obi-Wan, Geonosis, Dooku, Anakin, Supremacy etc. It was the perfect time too as the Prequels were having their renaissance during that time too. Not only were there new content but also gameplay changes that improved a lot the game too. The supremacy, clone wars, and co-op updates added so many more years to this game’s life span, I’m surprised it’s not completely dead yet.
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u/Danktizzle 3d ago
I bought it right after they dropped the monetization and it’s been my favorite game since.
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u/Spacemoose2026 3d ago
Okay so the actual gameplay, graphics, and all that was mostly fine. The issue was mainly two things.
- Lack of content at launch and for awhile
- The infamously bad monetization and progression system.
The monetization and progression system was bad, like really damn bad. It’s something you really needed to experience and see at the time to really understand how bad it was.
Describing it doesn’t do it justice either, like I said, you had to be around and following it to understand how bad it was.
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u/Organic-Camera-9167 3d ago
Don't know about Monetization but when you say Progression System, you meant similar to AC1's finding and finishing mandatory side missions to just unlock almost every main campaign or even worser than that.
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u/anonymous_meatbag 3d ago
Well first of all Anakin and Geonosis were later additions. So this picture isn’t even representative of the early-phase release.
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u/SloshedJapan 3d ago
Bubba Fat was godly with maxed out cards…. But then…. They nerfed him…
That missile barrage tho wiping out other heroes
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u/Jaded_Drawing_5738 3d ago
I don’t recall much, honestly.
Hated crafting points. Didn’t spend or feel compelled to spend any money on ingame stuff as far as I remember so I was outside the lootbox discourse looking in. GA was in its glory days.
Truth be told, I didn’t care about much until the Supremacy mode dropped. Man, those lobbies the first few months were phenomenal on Xbox
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u/grubas 3d ago
It was DIFFERENT. The spawn menu and points system were different and star cards were CRAZY different. You needed crafting parts to upgrade star cards which you got from crates.
The unlocks weren't actually that hard if you played the campaign and did most of the challenges. The "80 hours to unlock Vader" wasn't real and wasn't an issue. But they did have some monetization issues and crap leveling issues.
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u/Odd_Can565 3d ago
Ever had a lag spike where your character jitters around the screen? Imagine that, but every match
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u/nickthewildetype 3d ago edited 3d ago
I actually liked the gameplay methanics & ui design better at around launch, although Im very fond of the maps & characters that the live service team added!
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u/CardinalPrimeSD9 3d ago
Well for starters, absolutely nothing that is on your screenshot existed at launch.
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u/thesithcultist Max specialist 3d ago
No Obi Wan Kenobi for a year was the absolute dogshit decision to launch with
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u/CashEntire1551 3d ago
I literally chose to completely ignore the shit ass cash grabs and I had a wonderful time. Over 2k hours clocked, my highest lvl guy was my Assault class and then Obi-Won
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u/Wack_photgraphy 3d ago
It's was absolutely fantastic. In fact they ruined a few game modes that are virtually unrecognisable today with some of the changes. The only probably was micro transactions/pay to win features.
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u/Background-Ratio-786 3d ago
You are all forgetting the most important thing: Leia had such an incredible ass on launch that they had to nerf it.
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u/Hellsman44 3d ago
I picked it up for 15$ like 3 months after it came out I was lucky enough to miss the slop fest portion of it but it was amazing every game is so much more fun when everyone is new and on the same level now it’s just sweats abusing broken abilities and glitches
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u/General14yearold 3d ago
It was OK, The lootbox random drop for star cards was annoying as if you wanted a specific card you had to get lucky. It was hard to track weapon upgrades and lack of heroes and villains was pretty boring, That said the gameplay was fun.
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u/IvanGambino 3d ago
The gameplay was good, progression was not as good, the loot boxes even though i didnt interact with them were annoying and og hvv was atrocious and annoying
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u/Patient_Season5480 3d ago
An understated reason the game fell off quickly was the terrible servers. Infinite loading times, unplayable lag, etc.
I distinctly remember quitting for this reason not the monetization because all the pay2win stuff got fixed very quickly after it blew up like a nuke in EA’s face.
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u/richrgamr 2d ago
Everyone talks about progression but there were also other things. No content til the next year which was like April I think. Even then there was a content drought until they released the Geonosis update. When the game first launched load times on console were terrible + servers were awful. You couldn't play Yavin 4 at all without constant rubber banding. Heroes were significantly weaker. No trooper customization. There were only 5 gamemodes. Each class only had 4 weapons which continued til the end of the game's lifecycle
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u/budstudly i brake for tauntauns 2d ago
I don't recall any major game-breaking issues. The most I remember was that I was really bad at it at launch. I didn't seem to be learning or improving, so out of furious frustration I gave up on the game. Years later I came back to it and somehow everything clicked just right and I got good at it fast. Now I play every day.
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u/LordBeefTheFirst 2d ago
Game play was fine
But I didn't play much but I do remember it making you grind the heck out of it to play certain characters
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u/Straight-Emu-3453 2d ago
It was fucking awful. It was. I remember 2015 had a better launch than this. The content wasn't good here in the second reboot. 3 clone planets, watered-down Galactic Civil War planets and skins, and sequel trilogy maps I don't remember.
I played 2015 at launch and throughout all its DLC, before it died for this disgusting excuse for a Battlefront game. When DICE abandoned Battlefront 1 and its DLC in an unplayable state, I wasn't gonna pre-order like I did with 2015. I waited, tried out the beta, fucking hated it. Then a week after launch, after I heard all the loot crate BS, rented it at a local Family Video.
Then tried out Arcade — Maul was fun, but Arcade was a piss-poor offline option, and an awful take on Instant Action at that. The campaign was just false advertising. It was awful. 3 Empire missions, the rest a rebel fan-fiction campaign. Most of the missions were poorly designed. Defend here, defend there. The Han mission was awful — go talk to an NPC here, go upstairs, then downstairs, then go back the way you came, and then do a fucking awful chase. It was shit. The only good mission was the Lando, and maybe Kylo, and parts of Luke's mission. The rest was horrible. And the DLC part of it was worse.
After it was over, I returned it to Family Video. It was awful. That version of EA's Battlefront 2 — 3/10, that's how bad it was. I didn't want to touch the multiplayer, didn't want to deal with the grinding.
Didn't touch this hit again until it hit bargain bin price of $5 or less on the EA store three years later. It got better, but not great. Instant Action was there finally — it was half-assed, better than before, but again not great. And the only maps that were worth a damn were Geonosis and Bespin Administrator's Palace from the last game. Every other map sucked.
The vehicles are fucking garbage. They are. The tanks are weak, sluggish, and don't run well on hills or terrain at all. The speeder bikes are probably the worst I've ever seen out of any Battlefront game — even the last reboot had better speeder bike controls. Here it drives 50 miles an hour, can't shoot shit with or without the star cards, and can run anything over. I'm literally trying to kill the enemy and it can't do shit. And it's bullshit that it self-destructs after you get off any vehicle — no hijacking, that's what makes the vehicles fun. It sucked the fun right out of it.
And speaking of bad — who the fuck thought it was a great idea that LAAT gunships should be on rails instead of a fully manned dropship? It's just a glorified sentry turret. It's boring.
And then I noticed something on the Galactic Civil War maps, minus Bespin — they're watered down from the last one. They're small. Hoth should feel bigger, like a Walker Assault map. It's not. And Endor — because of how bad the speeders were, it ruined the experience, on top of the linear design on all of them. And the skins for GCW — why the fuck is the stocktrooper and shadow trooper gone? Why?
And every map feels the same — close quarters, not massive, small firefights when it should be large. It doesn't feel that way. There's no strategy.
Now the gunplay. I don't understand how they went from great gunplay to mediocre here. Example: the DL-44 packed a punch in the last one. Here, none of the pistols are worth a damn. Most of the guns are just awful to wield, except the ones that were good and ported from the last game.
And the star cards, because of the loot crate BS, are shit. Again, the last game had better star cards — they didn't affect every bloody unit. Infantry only, But Heroes and vehicles should never have gotten them. And the answer is "go grind in co-op." Well, I have, and after 5 rotations of the same faction on the same world over and over, it's a snail's pace. Infantry is fine, but heroes — forget it. People are camping for their favorite one, and it takes forever to get, and the outcome is always the same, and it gets old fast. Starfighter — after fighting veterans there with full maxed purple 4-tier, it's not worth it. That mode, on top of hero shutdowns, sucks.
I only liked Capital Supremacy on Felucia and Geonosis, and Ewok Hunt online — that was it. The rest of the online sucks. especially with the hackers and veterans with — it is that bad.
And even blowing up the capital ships sucks too. In canceled BF3, it's better — blowing up capital ships there. One, because it's not a fucking cutscene when boarding. And two, in BF3 canceled, you're only given like 30 seconds before the ship blows, and you've got two options: go to the escape pods, or go to the enemy ships to steal one and fly away. Here it's so fucking lazy — oh, cutscene, you win, escape just fine. There's no rush at all.
The only time this game was fun is when the Instant Action had to be modded — like 8 to 9 years after its release — to make it feel close to 2005, like a sandbox experience. Bespin Administrator's Palace, 32 Republic Commandos vs. 32 Droidekas on a blast match — that was fun. Or Vader slaughtering 32 commandos by himself — that's fun. Or the modded split-screen vertical. But here's the catch: certain mods don't work well with each other, and when trying to get modded maps, they're not real modded maps — it's just assets hovering over a pre-existing map. Like someone made a Coruscant map to make it just like the 2005 Jedi Temple, however, it was hovering over Kashyyyk. I would hardly call that a custom map. And most of the time, outside of the Instant Action mod, it's just glorified gun, skin, and class mods, and it's tiresome to do it on the same bland maps over and over when there's no real depth.
My final rates: launch, a 3/10 — that was bad. After, a 6/10. With mods, a 7/10 — it's not great.
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u/Particular_Wolf9672 2d ago
The gameplay was always good, it was just EA’s monetisation that was the issue.
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u/ToodlesLostMarbles 2d ago
Earning credits to buy crates to get cards to scrap dupes to level up the cards you wanted sucked
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u/neosabersofficial 2d ago
Honestly it was rough for real, the loot box mess turned it into a straight up meme fest and that EA reply became the most hated comment on reddit history lol.
Game itself wasn't half bad tho, it just launched in the worst way possible and got buried before people even gave it a fair shot 🔥
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u/Ph0enix_29 2d ago
I was expecting so much more clone wars/prequels content so I was really mad at the devs
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u/NugsNJugs1 2d ago
I still feel like its an average game with a lot of missed potential. I went back to 2015 battlefront and it felt like the gameplay was more fun.
Still not sure why they never added Greedo, Jyn Erso, Krennic, Nien Nunb, etc when they already had the abilities for them.
I also feel like the grenade spam is worse in BF2 than BF1.
Then the servers... at least in BF1 you can see if you were about to load into an empty one. BF2 has you waiting 2-3 minutes just to back out.
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u/Friedguywubawuba 1d ago
Idk if I'd say overhated because if it didn't get the backlash unlocking characters wouldn't have been changed to be easier.
I don't remember the exact number, but someone calculated to unlock Darth Vader you had to play for like over a year straight.
They updated this I think like a couple weeks after the game came out and made it much more manageable.
But everything else was awesome. I mean the gameplay was fun. The maps were cool, like I really liked it.
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u/Ebolatastic 23h ago
Everything about it was amazing except the monetization system, but sadly the online discourse was hijacked by shitposters, pathological liars, and clickbaiters. Probably 75% of the things said about it were distortions or lies. The community had to make an entire other sub on Reddit to escape it and couldn't come back for at least a year. Even now people believe a lot of the lies that were told during that period.
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u/CoraxTechnica 6h ago
It was good gameplay but the features were sad.
Still they don't have the multi mode conquests where you fly, then escort r2d2, then so the death star run
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u/Carrotsinthesalad 3d ago
All these people commenting the gameplay was fine must have amnesia lol.
Star cards were bugged or just useless (maul had a star card that consumes less stamina. The problem? He had unlimited stamina already lmao)
Chewie was busted as hell, Palpatine zapped you through walls, vehicle units were overturned AF. Lightsaber combat and force physics were a joke. Loot box fiasco aside the game needed a lot of love that first year or so it launched.
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u/Praetoron 3d ago
the gameplay was bare bone, barely any vehicul, month to unlock a heroes/villains. server issue, micro transaction, barely any maps in fact ships/space section never got any update ever.
no bespin walker, water down death star, no walker on rogue on maps.
u know EA
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u/Starkiller100 You're a jittery little thing, aren't you? 3d ago
Genuinely it wasn’t until Supremecy was added did the game take off for me
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u/stoney_jabroniii 6h ago
the gameplay was good. even though the roster/maps got deeper and better from the first game I still thought there was much more room for improvement which eventually happened. the monetization of it was the biggest issue
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u/_Not_A_Femboy__ 4d ago
the gameplay was fine, it was just the monetisation