As you might have seen, things are going badly for the Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection, right out of the gate.
As spotted by IGN, the nostalgia package is currently battling a wave of bad reviews on its Steam page, as players complain of matchmaking issues, server problems and numerous bugs. Players have complained of everything from joining broken matches to problems detecting mice, keyboards and controllers. At the time of writing, the game’s Steam review average had sunk to Mostly Negative from almost 3,000 reviews. Indeed, the backlash online has been so dire that it led IGN to describe the launch as a ‘disaster’. Many more players, lashing out on social media, called it ‘robbery’.
Publisher Aspyr has been trying to bring extra servers online since the game’s launch, but the player base has already taken to social media to air its grievances. Despite only incremental updates on the original games to get them working on modern platforms, this collection is notably absent of modern QoL improvements, which may be contributing to its woes. Also not helping: a $AU51.22 price tag, which is high for a collection that makes so few changes.
Also worth noting: copies of Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection were seemingly only given to a small number of critics ahead of launch. Metacritic currently displays a total of nine critic reviews, with an average rating of 83, classing it as Generally Favourable — a far cry from the wider user experience, it seems. Australia’s Press Start was the sole local outlet to get an early code and was seemingly the only fully commercial outlet among smaller, enthusiast press. Indeed, its 8.5-out-of-10 review was the only one of the nine to mention online play at all. “Servers were understandably empty during pre-release, but I played multiple hours with one other player, with our teams filled in with bots. Online performance was strong, and I didn’t run into any technical errors or crashes, but this could change with another 62 players in the mix.” Seems things did, in fact, change with another 62 players in the mix.
None of the eight other reviews spoke about online play at all.
To give these critics the benefit of the doubt: It’s possible they were only able to play the single-player version of the game with bots ahead of launch, which may have kept problems with online under wraps. Some mentioned co-op, but none in a way that specifically talks about the online experience. Some even mentioned the bugs — some as old as the Battlefront franchise itself — and then immediately forgave their appearance rather than ask why Aspyr hadn’t done anything to fix them. I have to wonder why these outlets published scored reviews without doing that extra day of post-launch due diligence. 24 hours is the difference between these reviews reflecting problems that would massively affect the public experience and not.
Let it be a lesson to all of us in this gig: Holding off for a day to confirm whether the online multiplayer actually works will always be ok. The review embargo is the earliest possible time you can go live with coverage. It’s not a deadline, and we have to stop treating it like it is.
So if you were hoping to pick this package up for the weekend, maybe hold off for now. Hopefully, there’ll be some updates to come.
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