Star Wars: Battlefront feels like a corporate attempt at making a Star Wars game and is almost entirely devoid of the passion and enthusiasm in almost every Star Wars game released before it.
With its white clinical UI and limited game modes, Star Wars: Battlefront feels like a bare minimum attempt to cash in on the success of the original series, and when coupled with paywalled content and a diminished single-player mode, Star Wars: Battlefront has very little to offer longtime Star Wars fans and nothing to FPS fans due to its barebone gunplay and limited content variety.
Image credit Star Wars: Battlefront - Published by Electronic Arts and developed by DICE.
A good rule of thumb when wanting to make a sequel that is praised by an established community is offering at least as much content as the previous entry while adding as many features as possible, something which DICE failed to do, stripping out Space combat, and launching with just four planets, something that was intended to be supplemented with DLC.
Unfortunately for DICE, Star Wars: Battlefront launched when players were rightfully getting tired of paying for DLC they would only get to enjoy for a few weeks before matchmaking died off, and players were forced to return to base game maps.
Because of this, Star Wars: Battlefront’s DLC sold poorly, resulting in several DLC packs enjoying just a few days of matchmaking support and DLC 4 (Rogue One Scariff) enjoying less than 24 hours of stable matchmaking on PC before players were forced to return to base game content that had itself struggled to provide stable matchmaking since shortly after launch.
By the time the final DLC of the season pass was released (December 2016), Star Wars: Battlefront was almost entirely dead on PC, and the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 community was not far behind, with even popular modes unable to fill more than a few lobbies during peak NA/EU playtime.
Image credit Star Wars: Battlefront - Published by Electronic Arts and developed by DICE.
While many FPS titles from 2010-2018 are dead on at least one platform (usually PC), Star Wars: Battlefront is one of the only AAA titles from that era to be dead on all platforms, despite being included on multiple subscription services and having been given away several times.
While a few lobbies can be found during peak NA/EU playtimes on console, they often take a long time to fill up, a situation that, while dire, is multiple times better than on PC, where Star Wars: Battlefront barely has enough players online worldwide to fill a single 40 player lobby.
As of February 2023, players who wish to play with others should seek out one of the community discords and arrange matches; however, even the most popular server can only arrange a handful of full-lobby matches each week.
Image credit Star Wars: Battlefront - Published by Electronic Arts and developed by DICE.
Star Wars: Battlefront was one of the last AAA titles to utilize a paid map pack DLC model, with most publishers swapping to a cosmetic monetization model by 2017
Star Wars: Battlefront is a visually impressive game, and it holds up very well in 2023 despite fast approaching its 10th birthday.
After Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005)’s well-received campaign and galactic conquest mode, DICE was certainly brave (or foolish) not to include meaningful single-player content in Star Wars: Battlefront.
Unfortunately, this gamble did not pay off, and players quickly became bored of the infinitely replayable skirmish mode that was the only tangle single-player content available to players who desired to spend more time playing than waiting in half-full lobbies praying that they would fill up before other players in the lobby grew tired of waiting and logged off.
Image credit Star Wars: Battlefront - Published by Electronic Arts and developed by DICE.
Star Wars: Battlefront is a shooter video game developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts, it was released on 15 November 2015 and retails for $19.99.
Star Wars: Battlefront is available on the following platforms: PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
Star Wars: Battlefront is no longer in active development, and the developers have moved on to other projects.
As of April 2024, around 2500 people play Star Wars: Battlefront on a fairly regular basis.
Star Wars: Battlefront is essentially dead, and finding full lobbies in a reasonable amount of time is difficult in well-populated regions, and next to impossible in less populated regions.
Star Wars: Battlefront supports:
Star Wars: Battlefront offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Star Wars: Battlefront is rated PEGI 16+ and contains the following:
Star Wars: Battlefront had little to offer fans at launch and even less seven years later. As a result, I cannot recommend it.
Despite its terrible launch, Star Wars: Battlefront II features an abundance of both single-player and multi-player content and enjoys the full benefits of a large and active community.
