DON'T WE DESERVE BETTER?
However many weeks ago, the announcement trailer drops. We get sketchy footage of Fisto without his special saber blade, and Ventress basically being a Aayla Secura clone. Immediately the community cried foul. Community modder iamashyamin's content had been stolen and put in a trailer. I thought surely a professional studio wouldn't need to do such a thing. I was wrong.
Now to be fair:
- shaymin isn't up in arms about this
- We technically got the models and code from Pandemic
Still, Aspyr PR doubles down, saying that footage was in error, and that no mod content would be included in the release. But then there's footage of the game on PlayStation and Switch with the modder's content. It's stupid. Why, when you have access to source code, do you even need content from modders? Again, it's stupid, lazy, and very unprofessional.
I won't even get into the absolute garbage scow of a launch the game was, nor how many bugs it has/had.
WHY AM I UP IN ARMS ABOUT THIS?
Well I've been here since the beginning. In '04 I bought SWBF1. In '05 I was newly married and my wife scraped up the money to buy me SWBF2. I was the original project lead on the Star Wars Battlefront Conversion Pack before Maveritchell took over. I've been an admin at Gametoast since '05, and released 300+ modder assets and more than 30 maps.
This, in my opinion only, came down to corporate greed. Probably some executives got bonuses if the game launched in [x] window time frame. I don't know that, just a guess. Meanwhile I'm sure a lot of the Aspyr in-the-trenches employees got shafted because they knew the game was broken, but had to follow their "leaders". It's a story told time and again. I've been modding games for probably 25 years and it's the same story.
Video credit: Battlefront Updates on YouTube
WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR ME TO SUPPORT THE CLASSIC COLLECTION WITH MODS?
For me the price is probably a bit higher than most, but I still don't feel it's unreasonable. The short version is they need to fix everything, then also include some quality of life improvements to the game.
It's not enough for me to be sure that multiplayer works great, or that they've fixed nearly 20 year old bugs like the Death Star ticket drains or Han Solo's award weapon bug. We've fixed those dozens of times over, but don't publish them because they break multiplayer.
Show me more. Make mod support easy. Make it so that we don't have to fix your crappy setup to get mods working again, like our awesome community members are already doing. I'd love it if mod.io support were actually included, and thusly I could play my and other people's great maps on console, where I do most of my gaming.
Until this my official statement is this: None of my maps and/or mods are supported in the Classic Collection, and I further do NOT authorize tools to convert them over.
I totally agree... it's been a bit of a disaster. At least we still have the OG on Steam and I just hope they don't delist it.
On the bright side, most maps will work easily in CC anyways, so they're there for those who play that way, no special conversion needed.
Wow. We got a real og Battlefront veteran here.
Maveritchell, GameToast, those are names I have not heard in a long time.
Battlefront II was the game where I first discovered this concept of a "mod" as a kid. That your favorite game could have dozens of incredible, creative, cool fan-made levels and concepts. It blew my 11 or 12 year old mind, and one of the very first mods among those I downloaded must have been the famous Conversion Pack. I'm sure I must have played some of your other maps at some point or other too.
So, since I have the chance to say it,
Thank you. Sincerely.
Battlefront fans owe as much to the fantastic community of modders who have kept the game thriving for decades, as we do to the original developers at Pandemic who brought us this immersion in the Star Wars battles like nothing else before or since.
Thank you! Made my day!