Has anyone played Battlefront 2?
- Thread starter WraithDukat
- Start date
I caved and bought it, all the problems are linked to multiplayer which I have zero interest in. It's actually quite enjoyable, I would recommend it.
Well, this has been such a disaster for EA that about $3 billion worth of stock value got wiped out. Sales for BF2 have cratered and it's not selling anywhere near what the previous entry did.
Heads are probably gonna roll at EA over this. Shareholders don't like these kinds of fuckups.
Heads are probably gonna roll at EA over this. Shareholders don't like these kinds of fuckups.
It still boggles my mind that somebody at EA thought you could premium-price a game and slap the kind of grind-it-out-or-pay-to-win microtransaction model that's more befitting a free/cheap mobile game.
Doing both at the same time is just overtly greedy. Gamers can be whiny assholes a lot of the time but a system like this is simply ridiculous and deserved to be shredded.
What's even worse for the game's future is that, apart from initial sales being much lower than expectations--a situation one could hope to recover from with a long tail--is that there is no way they can bring back the microtransaction model, which was no doubt figured into the game's budget. So now they have a game where they expected to make so much money from initial sales and so much money from microtransactions on the backend, and both are fucked. This is likely to be a tremendous money loser which means we won't likely see another Battlefront title anytime soon.
I wonder if they might even shutter EA DICE over this.
Doing both at the same time is just overtly greedy. Gamers can be whiny assholes a lot of the time but a system like this is simply ridiculous and deserved to be shredded.
What's even worse for the game's future is that, apart from initial sales being much lower than expectations--a situation one could hope to recover from with a long tail--is that there is no way they can bring back the microtransaction model, which was no doubt figured into the game's budget. So now they have a game where they expected to make so much money from initial sales and so much money from microtransactions on the backend, and both are fucked. This is likely to be a tremendous money loser which means we won't likely see another Battlefront title anytime soon.
I wonder if they might even shutter EA DICE over this.
I hope EA loses the Star Wars license over this...
I'd laugh my ass off. But who would take it up since it's probably an absurdly expensive license to have? Trek had the same problem.
Having an exclusive license is certainly expensive. So, the smart thing would be a non-exclusive license--let different studios have a crack at it. I assume Disney would still want say in what gets made for QC purposes (especially after this debacle), but I would hope they learned some kind of lesson from this anyway.
Nah. Next year they'll just up the microtransactions in the sports titles. Wanna play franchise in Madden 19? Five bucks. Want to use your favorite team? Three bucks. Want to use the actual players from the NFL? Five bucks.
What was even funnier was at a Conference the CFO of EA said they couldn't have just done cosmetic loot boxes because it would have affected "canon" and they were really concerned about "canon".
After which someone actually found a functioning cosmetic menu in the game files and was able to access it and show that either EA planned on bringing it in at a later stage or cut it from the game in favor of P2W lootboxes...
Either way the CFO of EA got caught in a pretty big lie:
These guys just don't seem to have any ability to get things right. They say and do ALL the wrong things.
A friend of mine told me it was just like the last one and it pretty much sucked so I'll pass like I did on the first one.
I've seen people talking about wanting EA to lose the license so we can get a bigger variety of games, but that's really not necessary. EA is just the publisher and they have a ton of studios who create games in a huge variety of genres. Just on their featured games page alone we have A Way Out, a story driven co-op either action or adventure game, Anthem, a 3rd-person action game, BF2, Need for Speed, Sims 4, and the EA Sports games.
The BF games aren't even their only SW games, they've also got a couple of mobile games, neither of which are shooters.
We were also supposed to get a story driven 3rd person action game from Amy Henig, the director of the first 3 Uncharted games, but they ended up shutting down the studio making it, and someone else is now reworking it.
The BF games aren't even their only SW games, they've also got a couple of mobile games, neither of which are shooters.
We were also supposed to get a story driven 3rd person action game from Amy Henig, the director of the first 3 Uncharted games, but they ended up shutting down the studio making it, and someone else is now reworking it.
To be fair, its not DICE's fault that BF has a crappy microtransaction system, that's all EA's fault. They also did it in their recent Need for Speed game. People seem to want EA to lose their license because of their predatory MT practices, not because of the quality of the base game. It doesn't matter if DICE or Bioware or EA Tiburon or any other EA run studio develops the game, its EA the publisher that's really screwing things up. Now, the gameplay of BFII might also be lackluster, I'm not going to put down money to see. but the thing that's broken the game from what I can see online are the pay to win lootbox elements, and that was certainly a 100% EA the publisher decision.
Outside of self published games by small developers, bad lootbox/microtransaction systems are the fault of the publishers 99% of the time. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a great example of this. I remember hearing that atleast one developer outright didn't want people to not buy the MT because the game wasn't developed or balanced with them in mind, the developers were forced to put them in by the publisher. Now DICE probably knew they were going to have to put the BS Microtransactions in BFII very early in development unlike deus Ex, but that still doesn't change the fact that its EA's greedy, shitty decisions that have really screwed with BFII, and that would have happened regardless of what specific team of developers made the game.
A few mobile games aren't exactly what I'd call using the licence to it's fullest. They did have another Star Wars game in development, but they shit-canned it because it was single-player and they couldn't effectively monetise it to death.
The real reasons people don't want EA to keep the licence is 1) It's EA and EA if fucking terrible. And 2) It's an *exclusive* licence, which means they have a monopoly on top tier Star Wars games. A monopoly they've just proven with this very game that they're willing to abuse in the most blatantly greedy way possible.
I didn't realize EA was responsible for the whole lootbox fiasco, I assumed that came purely from DICE.
Them killing Amy Hennig's game because it was single player, makes a lot more sense than story or gameplay issues. I found it hard to believe that one of the main architects of the Uncharted series could really be responsible for a game so bad it had to be cancelled.
I have been a bit surprised by how few SW games we've gotten since EA got the license.
Them killing Amy Hennig's game because it was single player, makes a lot more sense than story or gameplay issues. I found it hard to believe that one of the main architects of the Uncharted series could really be responsible for a game so bad it had to be cancelled.
I have been a bit surprised by how few SW games we've gotten since EA got the license.
Well monetisation is typically a publisher thing, not a developer thing and EA published games have had an increasing push towards this sort of thing since the Dead Space 3/Mass Effect 3 days.
I mean look at Dragon Age Inquisition: a *huge* open world RPG that can easily take 100 hours or more to complete and they slap on a half-arsed multiplayer mode specifically so they can push micro-transactions. Most (myself included) let it slide because it's just tacked on, doesn't impact the rest of the game and can easily be ignored. It's just now they've crossed the line by baking it into the game's progression mechanics.
Any yeah, they're utterly squandering a licence that could see them earn huge profits because they're so greedy that they want *all* the profits forever.
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