Image: Aspyr
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection launched with just three 64-player servers in total - among many, many other problems.
Aspyr Media’s re-release bundle of the classic Star Wars: Battlefront games has come under fire due to its disastrously buggy launch state. Among other things, players have criticised the game for launching with just three 64-player servers available - meaning that thousands were locked out of multiplayer at launch - and cutting out content from the original game like campaign cutscenes and sound effects.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection bundles up Star Wars: Battlefront and Star Wars: Battlefront 2, bringing the iconic shooter duology to modern platforms with online multiplayer and additional content. Unfortunately, it looks like developer Aspyr Media just couldn’t deliver.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection suffers disastrous launch
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is being lambasted for its fairly disastrous launch, with players specifically calling out its dysfunctional online multiplayer and bug-ridden gameplay. The game launched with just three servers available for Star Wars: Battlefront 2, each supporting 64 players in total. The bundle launched on Steam with around 9000 peak concurrent players, so you can imagine just how many players found themselves locked out of multiplayer at launch. More servers apparently opened up later, but by then it was too little too late.
Players have also reported missing content, such as cutscenes from the main campaign absent in this re-release along with specific sound effects. Some have also pointed out that the bundle is absurdly massive in terms of storage space, as the original games only took up around 13-14GB total, whereas the Classic Collection needs a whopping 72.58GB of space.
More players are reporting serious gameplay issues like game crashes and bugs. Here’s a particularly egregious example:
The game now has an ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ rating on Steam thanks to these problems. Aspyr has since issued a statement on the game’s launch state:
“We’d like to thank the Battlefront community for their overwhelming support and feedback for the STAR WARS Battlefront Classic Collection release. At launch, we experienced critical errors with our network infrastructure. The result was incredibly high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser. Since launch, we’ve been working to address these issues and increase network stability, and we will continue our efforts until our network infrastructure is stabilised to prevent further outages.”
Not only does the statement conveniently leave out any form of an apology, but it also ignores criticism of the Classic Collection’s bugs, crashes and missing content.