With the Steam user reviews now comfortably at "Overwhelmingly Negative," it's fair to say that the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection has been a disaster. Pilloried by players as "Probably one of the worst launches of all time" within hours of release, the collection has been a black eye for Aspyr after last month's well-regarded Tomb Raider remasters (weirdness regarding the momentarily better Epic Games Store version aside).
In the wake of all that, the company has released a (stunningly brief) statement on where it plans to go from here. Thanking the Battlefront community for its "overwhelming support and feedback" for the Classic Collection—which is certainly one way of phrasing it—Aspyr cops to the fact that it "experienced critical errors with our network infrastructure" that caused "high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser."
Yep, makes sense! Those are all issues that players have been complaining about since the collection dropped yesterday, and I even ran into a couple of them—matchmaking glitches and crashes—myself when I tried to play a bit of Battlefront yesterday.
Most intriguing, though, is the claim that "servers [were] not appearing in the browser." One of the most baffling and oft-reported problems with the Battlefront Classic Collection was the fact that it apparently launched with just three 64-player dedicated servers for around 10,000 concurrent players. Now it seems like Aspyr is saying the issue was not in the amount of servers but their visibility, which was obscured by glitches or the machinations of the Sith.
It'd make sense: I dropped into the game not too long after launch and found far more than three dedicated servers in Battlefront 2 and five in Battlefront 1 (which isn't many, but was enough to cater to the relatively few people playing it).
Anyway, Aspyr pinky promises it's working on it: "We’ve been working to address these issues and increase network stability, and we will continue our efforts until our network infrastructure is stabilized to prevent further outages."
All well and good, but maybe a little thin as statements go. The Battlefront games are beloved classics, and thousands of players were there on day one of Aspyr's collection to dive back into the glory days of 2005. Their disappointment has been immeasurable but vocal, and I imagine Aspyr's five-sentence hey-we're-working-on-it statement with no timeframe and no apology won't do much to placate them.
After all, there are still mysteries that Aspyr hasn't addressed yet. Plenty of players have complained of audio glitches and bad controller support, for instance, which the company doesn't mention in its statement. My main query is how on Earth the collection managed to turn two games from the mid-2000s (totalling about 12GB combined) into a 62.87GB download. I don't mean to kick the studio while it's down, but that's not a size increase I can see reflected in the game's graphical quality.
We'll see how things go, I suppose. I still hope Aspyr manages to miraculously pull this one out of the bag. The Battlefront games—and the people who bought them—deserve better.
