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[Neovalen]

Star Wars: Battlefront II

Publisher: Electronic Arts (Developed by DICE, Motive, and Criterion)

Release Date: 11/17/2017 (11/14/2017 for Deluxe Edition) - There will also be a 10 hour trial period with EA Access starting 11/9/2017.

Platforms: PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One

 

Full Length Reveal Trailer (Star Wars Celebration 2017):

 

Official Gameplay Trailer (EA Play 2017):

 

Sequel to the highly successful, yet much maligned, Star Wars: Battlefront (2015). Personally, I put in over 400 hours into the original as despite its flaws and lack of content at launch it is the most fun and immersive Star Wars experience you can have to date in my opinion. So far, this title appears to fix each and every criticism of the first game and it has been confirmed there will be at least 3 times the content of the original at launch.

 

Confirmed features for the sequel:

* Full campaign from the perspective of Iden Versio, commander of Inferno Squad—an Imperial special forces unit. This story is confirmed to be canon by Lucasfilm and will span the 30-year time frame between the destruction of the second Death Star to the formation of the First Order in the sequel era. There will be portions of the single player where you will play as iconic characters such as Luke Skywalker and Kylo Ren.

* There are also confirmed to be other offline single player / co-op modes, however details have not been released at this point.

* Large scale 40-player multiplayer battles across all three eras (Prequel, Original, and Sequel).

* Multiplayer will feature class based game play (4 classes - Assault, Heavy, Officer, and Specialist) with a large selection of heroes/villains, land and air vehicles. No more tokens scattered on the battlefield, it has been replaced with a resource system.

* Customization and progression has been a priority during development of the game. Examples: Weapon can be customized with a selection of attachments, vehicles can be customized, hero abilities changes, etc.

* Multiplayer space battles are confirmed and will also feature a class-like system for vehicles.

* Factions will be era specific but there will be hero based modes that can be played cross-era.

 

Looking great so far, I'll update this post as we learn more at EA Play 2017. It is confirmed game play will be shown and I should be able to get hands on with it.

[Neovalen]

For informative videos and more details on what we know so far, I suggest watching BattlefrontUpdates on YouTube.

 

Link: https://www.youtube....tlefrontUpdates

Example Video:

[SparrowPrince]

Cool info. I'm torn though whether to go PC or console. PC looked better but was a ghost town after a while and had cheaters. I got it on PS4 and it looked a bit blurry is all, but the games kept rolling at least. 

 

No hero tokens and classes are great news! I hope they won't sell maps again, but I won't hold my breath on that one. Please no more gadgets like the bacta bomb too. You couldn't see due to bacta particles sometimes, as literally 90% of players were using it. Better customization is something that is always welcome, but I was virtually broke all the time because I only had 80 hours total. Haha. Hoping the story mode is good. It better not be full of virtue signalling and characters that are pushed in for 'ma diversity'. Please don't be Andromeda is what I am saying. ;)

 

Other than that... Very nice!

[Shadriss]

The SP campaign is the one thing I'm looking at here - I've never been much of a MP player, and SW has always been about the story, so when there wasn't one for the first BF, all I could see was a missed opportunity. Maybe EA gets one right this time...

 

...but I wouldn't hold my breath. It IS EA, after all.

[SparrowPrince]

Was waiting  for the 'it's EA' comment.  They certainly have made some people wary though, I understand. I'm a campaign guy usually, but with a game like this, the multiplayer is always going to be more fleshed out. It will be better than the originals which basically passed multiplayer as a campaign, for sure.  Is there still no info on that future SW beefy SP game yet? Or did I imagine that? 

 

By the way, Jar Jar was nowhere in the trailer. I'm guessing he'll be in the base game as a joke somewhere or they'll hype him up in a DLC pack. They can't leave him out, YouTube thrives of this kind of stuff. 

[Shadriss]

I greatly fear that this IS the "beefy SP game" you mention, otherwise we'd have heard about something else by now, I think. I have been hearing rumors of BioWare working on another new SW project in the last few months, though it was mostly put together through assumptions, so who knows how accurate that is.

 

EA lost a lot of credibility with me in the 00's with a lot of obvious cash grabs. They've been better in the last five years or so, but as you say, the wariness remains, and will for some time I think.

[Neovalen]

Visceral games is developing a AAA single player star wars game, rumor is next year for release. No one knows much except for some minor clips at this point but it appears to coincide with the Han Solo movie in 2018 and based on the hired staff I'd imagine an uncharted/assassin's creed style gameplay.

[SparrowPrince]

Yes, that's the one! Didn't they also hint at resurrecting 1313 (if that is right)?

Neo what sort of loadout did you play the most? I remember you saying you liked that burst pistol once (SEC-14 was it?).

My gameplay was always very hit and miss because I am a bit too cautious. I think you have to rush in in a rather tactical manner to get the most points (that or camp those tokens which I never did). I never settled with a specific weapon like I do with other games either, they all felt a bit "off" in some way. I also remember there being quite a few of those annoying snow speeder players who strafed everyone for around 40 kills and 2 deaths per match. No idea how they did that (I'm an awful pilot), but their deaths were usally only because I shot them down. Crazy how good they were. Oh and Hero Hunt can suck a fat one. :P

Edited by SparrowPrince, 31 May 2017 - 12:19 AM.

[Shadriss]

So Visceral, possible a BioWare, possible 1313 revive. That would be an AWESOME year for me, if they actually exist and were decent. I'm a huge SW geek, and it's been a long while since there's really been a game that I've enjoyed under the name.

[SparrowPrince]

Waiting for ma boy Neo to get back and post impressions. It looks bananas! It honestly seems like my dream game and I ain't a huge, huge SW fan like some here. It seems like it's just everything I loved in the original BF2 and more. Day one.

 

It looks freakin' gorgeous too:

 

Edited by SparrowPrince, 12 June 2017 - 07:20 PM.

[SparrowPrince]

Being no one ever got back, I just want to say the BETA has been dreadful for me. I know it is not just because I am unwell at the moment, but it has just been a HUGE disappointment. A few examples:

- Blasters all feel like peashooters. I don't feel or see any of my shots connect as there doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot feedback anyway. Time to kill is also way too high for me personally.
- Theed is a visual and noisy mess. Were all those bits of debris and doves every 15ft necessary? Theed is also a bit too large for me even as a sniper; finding any action without running for a short time is tiresome.
- Space vehicle controls feel off, even tugging me in directions I didn't want to go at times.
- Looks worse than the last game and the environmental art is a step back for sure. The heroes and villains look much worse too (Han Solo is a great and ugly example).
-The UI is an abomination over the first game. I know it is going for nostalgia, but it looks dated.
- Random loot crates are crappy.

I mean... I enjoyed the Arcade mode and that was it really. I'll probably pick it up on sale for the above and the story, but I was REALLY looking forward to this so it is disappointing to say the least.

[Neovalen]

First, the content video:

Being no one ever got back, I just want to say the BETA has been dreadful for me. I know it is not just because I am unwell at the moment, but it has just been a HUGE disappointment. A few examples:

- Blasters all feel like peashooters. I don't feel or see any of my shots connect as there doesn't seem to be a hell of a lot feedback anyway. Time to kill is also way too high for me personally.
- Theed is a visual and noisy mess. Were all those bits of debris and doves every 15ft necessary? Theed is also a bit too large for me even as a sniper; finding any action without running for a short time is tiresome.
- Space vehicle controls feel off, even tugging me in directions I didn't want to go at times.
- Looks worse than the last game and the environmental art is a step back for sure. The heroes and villains look much worse too (Han Solo is a great and ugly example).
-The UI is an abomination over the first game. I know it is going for nostalgia, but it looks dated.
- Random loot crates are crappy.

I mean... I enjoyed the Arcade mode and that was it really. I'll probably pick it up on sale for the above and the story, but I was REALLY looking forward to this so it is disappointing to say the least.

I have a different take on many of these.

 

Re: Blasters - I feel they are more like guns than blasters since they are so thin and you can't see where they are going like in the first game. That being said, the variation between the weapons is very apparent in this game and I like that.

I love the look of Theed, maybe its just me but I can ignore the noise and never understood the complaint... lol I find the leaves, doves, civilians, droids all very cool.

Re: Space controls - Turn on advanced flight in the options, it'll get rid of the auto-leveling which is the tug your talking about... its much better after that. That being said, Starfighter Assault is my favorite part of the beta.

Re: Environmental - Its the Chromatic Aberration and Film Grain effects... they weren't present in the alpha and they recently caught flak for it in Battlefield 1... it should be toggle-able by launch day.

I do agree that Han Solo is very ugly compared to the first game... I can't understand that one but the others all look great. I think a lot of it is the shadowing from his hair.

Personally really like the UI, that being said the alpha UI was a bit better in the star card department. The spawn screen was also better in the alpha but they had to change it due to adding too much new content (what a problem to have...).

Random loot crates are fine imo, however I would like to see more progression based on actually playing a certain class.

 

I'm not a huge fan of the default button layout so I had to remap many of my keys but doing well after that. :) Thank god for configuration options.

There do seem to be a lot of lingering minor annoying issues. (See reddit thread for known issues)

 

All in all though, I'm enjoying the game and the minor issues aren't going to stop me from playing day one.

[SparrowPrince]

I mean it is easy to list the bad, but I was just so underwhelmed I thought it needed to be said.

I do like the specific roles this time around and I do like the fact that I can be a Specialist and top the leaderboard. Usually support and long range gets lost in the dust in other games. The progression is not too bad, but you will certainly have to play quite a lot if you don't want to spend anything. At least you get a crate for logging in everyday.

I'll try your star fighter tip for sure as that mode is pretty fun otherwise. I mean, no one really ever goes for the objective, but I guess that is more for me!

I didn't want to mention the post processing because you can get around that on PC, but it does make things look super blurry with things like CA on, yes. It's not just that though I feel. It looks like they used more traditional techniques this time around instead of lots and lots of photo scanning. The environments just don't seem as realistic which may be due to developing for the lowest common denominator (Xbox One is 900p dynamic this time instead of a paltry 720p I think).

Heroes do look a bit off sometimes for sure. They can also be a bit OP if you keep running off and getting your health back. This is a problem because a person will hog a hero the whole game if they are slightly competent. Shooting Darth Maul down to 25% health only for him then to run away and camp makes me not want to bother attacking him. In the first game they were OP, but I enjoyed hunting and getting the jump on them.

It has grown on me slightly since I posted the above, but it still feels rather 'off'. I know it is a old build, but it is near completion and yet it feels like an alpha. Hopefully blaster fire can be drastically improved by launch like you say. And please DICE don't add bactas in every class or something equally stupid. It's so refreshing no seeing everyone with jump packs too!

This made me laugh: