Star Wars Battlefront II just keeps looking better and better.
Not only are we getting a full single-player campaign this time around, but multiplayer sounds like it’s going to be a massive upgrade from Battlefront I (which I actually enjoyed despite its mixed reviews). It seems that EA has really taken the previous game’s criticism to heart and is addressing every major complaint against the game — including a really, really big one.
In an interview with Mashable, Bernd Diemer, DICE’s Creative Director on Battlefront II, said, “We don’t have a season pass.”
This is insane, considering the last game had a season pass that cost $50 and granted access to four full expansions that were otherwise priced at $15 a pop. It was a bit pricey, and people took notice.
Diemer gave more detail, explaining that the desire with this move away from a season pass model was to prevent the multiplayer experience from “having a fragmented community.”
That makes sense, since every time an expansion comes out for a multiplayer game, the community is divided between players who have the expansion and those who don’t. When you have four expansions, your community divides even further until it becomes so fragmented that the players left can no longer find full matches that match whatever combination of expansions they own.
But it sounds like the announcement may have been too good to be true, as EA later contacted Mashable and told them to “withhold the confirmation that there won’t be a Season Pass for Battlefront II.”
EA gave this statement:
While we’re not ready to confirm any live service plans just yet, what we can say is this we heard the feedback from our Battlefront community loud and clear. We know they want more depth, more progression, and more content. So we’re focused on delivering that in every dimension of Star Wars Battlefront II. We’ll have more to share about our plans soon.
So what happened?
I guess it’s possible that someone at EA told Diemer this was okay to talk about, perhaps in a Skype meeting late on a Friday afternoon when everyone was excited to leave for the day. Or maybe it was a miscommunication; perhaps some upper-level EA suit gave Diemer the okay without understanding what it was that was being okayed. Or maybe Diemer just decided to go rogue and blast this announcement to the world before EA could tell him not to.
Based off EA’s badness at communicating with fans — and my having worked in a major corporate headquarters (not EA’s, mind you) where communication was simply expected to be this bad — I have a hard time believing Diemer would be the one at blame in this situation.
Still, it’s frustrating to have something this major be announced, then maybe taken away, then left in a state of ethereal vagueness that, knowing EA, may not be fully clarified until November — or later.
EA, stop messing with my heart.
