There are few things which annoy me more than revisionist history, in all it's forms. Those that wantonly erase the past in order to bridge a perception of reality better attuned to their sensitive sensibilities- oh, it makes me angry it does! In the modern age, with information retention and education as rampant as it currently is there is absolutely no recourse for that sort of behaviour and those that fall to it squander the basic most tenets of our enlightened age. I loathe it. I loathe them. And you're probably wondering why I'm even talking about this in a blog ostensibly about the Star Wars Battlefront collection. Simple, because of all the remasters in that collection- they forgot all the good ones! Battlefront 1? Battlefront 2? They were already available on every platform under the sun, Aspyr? If you want to impress, then why don't you slap down some real work and port the unported- why not reintroduce the world to the several dozen Battlefield games that no one remembers but I?
What about 2007's Rouge Squadron, which brought a brand new narrative to the world rather than just adapting the battles of the movies like the original two games did, renovated galactic conquest to care more about reinforcement numbers and sprinkled in some special maps of their own? Or how about Elite Squadron which introduced simultaneous ground and space battles as well as the ability to design your own Jedi character in multiplayer. A horrendously unbalanced prospect, but they allowed it for some unhinged reason! Those games deserve the love they never got, abandoned to the PSP as they were, and that is the biggest cross I can bear as a Battlefront fan after all these years. Still- at least we got remasters of the classic two, meaning that perhaps there's hope for the team to sometime get around to- oh wait, no they even bungled these remasters- there's no way they could pull off a port.
That's right, some incredible how Aspyr has done it again. In their infinite misfortune yet another porting job of theirs has turned into an abject disaster of truly envious proportions. Who could have thought that the whole 'Knights of the Old Republic 2' situation could be topped, wherein they promised to incorporate the 'Restored Content' mod which is largely considered an absolute must for the successful running of the game- only to ghost the mod creators and give up on the process for simply no reason. (Maybe they were getting crashes on the forest moon in testing- I had to go into the individual files and extract the mod bit by bit to get that place working when I played it.) Battlefront should have been a cakewalk in comparison. A simple over-in-one project.
But what resulted was a game that hardly runs in it's most important aspect- the online. See, that's the only real draw of this remaster collection- a online audience with which to play these classic games to replace those official severs for the originals which died several ages ago. Having new servers to play on means new life could be breathed into those old classics, assuming that people can actually access those servers which- at launch, they couldn't. Only three or so official servers were visible to most players, and those servers ran like hot garbage stuffed in the carburettor of a sedan- which is to say, they didn't run even slightly.
Dropped frames, connection drops, awful hit registering- typically bad online launches have been laid at the blame of developers largely underestimating their beginning player numbers- and whilst I think it's true that the Battlefront Collection had a bigger day one than the developers expected, some of these performance issues feel like fundamental design flaws that the team just weren't on the lookout for. You telling me there were no lag issues during internal tests? Did they run a single full 64 player match to see how it held up, because that would surely expose the problems- right? Did they even have any QA team work on this game at all? All the sorts of questions we need to ask ourselves now that Aspyr has shown it's ass more than once.
Afterall people were already casting a wary eye at the game which showcased an outdated version of a popular PC mod instead of the real game they were supposed to be porting in the promotional material. Oh yeah, within the reveal trailer the team decided to throw up some modders efforts at bringing one of the console exclusive hero characters onto the PC game with a model swap which achieved everything except emulate the unique curved shape of this particular character's sith blade; which was later amended for later releases of that mod. The trailer showcased that same character with the generic straight shaped version of the blade hilt, giving away that what we were seeing was not, in fact, footage of the product we were being sold. (Assuming we believe the now questionable assertion that the Team absolutely did not use mods whatsoever during the port process.)
Now Aspyr aren't an entirely unskilled team full of hacks or anything, I'm not trying to say that. I just think they have a habit of biting off far more than they can chew. God knows what was going on with the KOTOR remake when it was in their hands, but Sony all but forcibly ripped the IP out of their grip the second their work was made public for them to see- which makes me curious if not apprehensive to learn more. (Perhaps during the next disastrous Sony leak which I'm guessing we'll be getting in the year. The company can't keep a server secure for the life of them.) They launched a decent remaster of the first few Tomb Raider games recently, which might have been what kept them too busy to correctly launch Battlefield!
But do you want to know the worst part, what really grinds my gears? I would be interested in this game if only the team fixed it, the same way I'm interested in picking up the Metal Gear collection at some point. But I cannot, in good spirits, endorse getting a game which remasters two games from a multidecade old franchise and somehow managed to be over 60 Gig in download size. What the heck is wrong with Video Game compression tools when the 14 gig original games are ballooned by actual magnitudes without any noticeable serious improvements. It's madness, is what it is! Save us some damn Hard drive space you fools!
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