The Deservingly Awful November 2017 of EA Games
I hope your month is going better than EA’s dismal November.
What started as one of the most anticipated games of the holiday season, Star Wars Battlefront II became the ire of a fanbase that has had enough of EA’s frustrating decisions hampering their experiences with Star Wars gaming entirely. It has resulted in EA’s stock taking a hit, pre-orders plummeting, reviews being quite negative, the most unpopular Reddit post in the history of the website, having sections of the game banned from certain countries, and even Disney having to secretly chime in to see why the chaos has brewed to this point. Pointing out the frustrating history of Star Wars gaming in the 21st century and EA’s ridiculous history with everything is pointless (Even though I have yet to forgive them for killing NFL 2K, the best sports franchise of the 2000s). I will dwell straight to the point: gamers are sick of loot boxes and microtransactions, and the mighty game to fall hardest on the sword is Star Wars Battlefront II.
Is Battlefront II the first game with the play-to-win technique? Absolutely not, but most of those types of games start out free, not $60. Is Battlefront II the first game with loot boxes? No, but very seldom do loot boxes play off like a gambling game that randomizes your rewards, forcing you to play more for the opportunity to improve. Is Battlefront II the first game with the option to pay your way to having more goodies and characters? No, but this is the first major title arguably to tip the scales in favor of those that shell out the extra money. To hide two of the most popular characters behind 40 hours of required gameplay in a game that is nearly 100% online-multiplayer is ridiculous, especially with a minimal single-player mode.
Let’s compare Battlefront II to other games that required extra cash, and some that even came incomplete when released. Grand Theft Auto V is a monster of a success story, and one of the best-selling video games in history. But, the world forgets that the game released without online play prepared to go. So why would a game like this survive that potential drawback? Because the game beefed up its single-player mode to a point of overkill, giving the gamer 50-60 hours of mayhem before even approaching playing online. Sm4sh Brothers for the WiiU didn’t have its full roster upon release, with characters you knew had to and were going to show up. But, the major players were already there, so anybody else felt like icing on the cake. And that icing consisted of Cloud, Ryu, and even Bayonetta. Any drawbacks you could find with Sm4sh (single-player still isn’t Melee-esque) were being erased because the lineup of fighters was so, so damn good.
Point is, EA took a good game by a good developer (One they haven’t killed yet, R.I.P. Visceral Games) and completely turned it upside down by locking away chunks of the game behind microtransactions, loot boxes, and unnecessary requirements to obtain characters you already paid $60 to play as. $60 should have earned you Luke and Vader immediately, no questions asked. I don’t care about the business aspects of it, you half-assed the amount of available Star Wars content and shoved classic characters behind a wall of requirements and expected gamers to be okay with it; a fanbase that has just gotten over the death of the highest-profiled Star Wars game since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. And the wave of negativity has boiled over to a point that entire countries are banning the practice entirely from the video game. All this because EA got greedy and wanted to mooch off some extra dollars.
Star Wars Battlefront II had the chance to make extremely good money without the microtransactions. Just give the Star Wars fans a complete game with plenty of callbacks and characters, and in the midst of the Star Wars revival helmed by Disney it would have been the massive hit of the holiday season. Battlefront II is right in between Rogue One (the best Star Wars movie since the 1980s) and The Last Jedi (potentially the biggest American film of all-time once the dust settles). They had all the momentum in the world, all they had to do was deliver. And from start to finish, the game was botched completely.
We live in a gaming world where Nintendo is constantly overhauling a multi-player heavy video game for no cost whatsoever to give it some new life in the online community. Why on earth did EA think they could get away with Battlefront II?