There’s never been a shortage of doom-spouting and naysaying when it comes to EA’s 2015 reboot of the Star Wars Battlefront video game series. The game hadn’t been out for a month when rumors started flying about its poor sales figures and how it was destined to be the flop of the year.
Time has proven this misconception wrong, as Star Wars Battlefront was one of the top-selling video games of both 2015 and 2016.
But another rumor I’ve been hearing more recently is that the community has long moved on to other things. If you try to jump into Battlefront’s multiplayer, they say, you’ll be met with the sound of crickets.
And this wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. With hype building for a more robust sequel (one with a single-player campaign this time), as well as another mainline Star Wars film, it only makes sense that players would have moved on in search of greener pastures.
Still, I can’t help but be a perpetual skeptic when it comes to Battlefront rumors, so I decided to put this rumor to the test.
What I found was a community as lively as ever. Yes, people are definitely still playing Star Wars Battlefront, at least on PS4.
I played between four and five hours of the game on two separate nights. I jumped between the meaty and chaotic Walker Assault game mode to smaller-scale modes like Blast and Cargo. While there was a constant shuffling of players, the servers were always mostly full — I’d say at least 75%.
Of course, there was a sale this week due to Star Wars Day, so several new players have probably joined the battle recently. In fact, I was seeing a lot of players with empty Star Card slots, suggesting their levels were still pretty low.
So I decided to check out some of the DLC servers. If there were to be a dropoff in players, it would almost certainly affect the DLC servers worse than the base game servers, as the expansions have a smaller player base than the main game. I hopped into the Scarif and Death Star servers, and those were just as lively as any of the others I’d tried. I found myself among players who were using pretty late-game weapons and items, suggesting these were some hardcore, long-term players.
It’s possible these were just old timers back for the Star Wars Day XP boost, but I have a feeling the people I was up against were in it for the long haul rather than just in-and-outers.
As far as I can tell, Star Wars Battlefront‘s PS4 community is doing just fine. It looks like the Battlefront naysayers were wrong once again.
