Yesterday, 15-year-old multiplayer shooter Star Wars: Battlefront 2 unexpectedly received its first update in three years, although the patch was later taken down because ultimately, it broke the game for many players. Interestingly, the game remains quite popular despite the fact that the Battlefront franchise was rebooted by DICE.
DICE’s modern Star Wars: Battlefront 2 has recently hit an impressive milestone reaching 19 million unique players. That’s quite an achievement for a game, which is no longer ed as the last update released almost a year ago. Additionally, Battlefront 2 by EA and DICE was initially met with overwhelming criticism because of an infuriating number of microtransactions and lootboxes. It wasn’t long until this oppressive monetization was abandoned, though, but the game’s reputation never recovered completely.
Considering all the controversy surrounding the modern reboot of Battlefront 2, it’s quite understandable why the original game keeps its popularity and attracts thousands of players a decade and a half after the initial release. To keep the original title updated, Lucasfilm Games released an unexpected patch yesterday. The update wasn’t announced beforehand - nor was it followed by detailed patch notes. Instead, the short description read that the surprising hotfix solved numerous issues regarding graphic resolution and controller in classic Star Wars: Battlefront 2. Although at first, the reception from the devoted community was highly positive, players soon started reporting on various issues and problems with the game. According to gamers, the patch broke the multiplayer title resulting in constant crashes, freezes, lost for mods, and an overall unplayable state. The patch was quickly rolled back to return the game to the previous stable version. Currently, there’s no ETA on when the update might be reintroduced.
Star Wars: Battlefront 2 is not the only Pandemic’s legacy game receiving treatment with modern patches. Last year, the original Battlefront title was updated to multiplayer battles on Steam. The game had suffered from the absence of official multiplayer since 2012 when GameSpy servers were closed, but thanks to the last-year surprising initiative by Valve providing its very own online servers, the popular title was gloriously revitalized. The update also included various fixes and technical improvements.
It feels like the recently reassembled Lucasfilm Games brand is trying to give the older Star Wars titles some well-deserved love and modern treatment, but in the case of Star Wars: Battlefront 2, the good intentions ended up breaking the game completely. It’s disappointing to see that an update was released without any internal tests that would’ve shown a number of issues, which were instead experienced by gamers. Hopefully, any further initiatives in updating older titles will be more thoroughly prepared for launch.
Source: Steam Community
