Star Wars Battlefront collection suffers server issues and bugs at launch
15.03.2024 - 15:01
/ thesixthaxis.com
/ Kit Fisto
The fan-pleasing launch of Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection has descended into despair, as gamers eager to enjoy the early 2000s multiplayer games once more on modern systems have instead found the game’s launch to be plagued by server issues and other troubles. Aspyr has quickly addressed some of the issues, and issued a statement on the problems the game faced.
On launch night, issues with the remastered game collection servers led to just three official servers being listed in-game, with Aspyr noting “critical errors” in the aftermath. While more servers were available a few hours after launch, there’s still be bugs, issues with stuttering and high pings.
Aspyr is working to address these problems, issuing the following statement:
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 stabilized to prevent further outages.
Please continue to report bugs, errors, or unexpected behaviors to our support team via our Request Form
The Aspyr Team
It’s might feel quite baffling that 20-year-old games could have problems such as this, but as with any online game launch, the developers need to have provisioned enough servers and optimise them to handle high player counts. On a somewhat different scale, the Diablo 2 remaster also suffered from server load issues at launch, with Blizzard having to dig back into the decades old network code to find modern optimisation techniques.
The problem for Aspyr is that they now have an uphill struggle to recover from the “Mostly Negative” review rating on Steam. It’s also not just the servers, but there’s oddities like not being able to invert flight controls, some kind of weird patch issue on PlayStation, missing cutscenes and more. More generally, there’s also a disappointing lack of cross-play.
Another strange issue is that this remaster is significantly larger than the games were at their original launch. The Classic Collection bundles together both Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2, and adds console-exclusive characters and maps like Kit Fisto and Jabba’s Palace into the mix, but it comes in at 57GB on Xbox and 25GB on Switch, when the originals each fit on a standard DVD. The only explanation is the use of upscaled textures for 4K, but this has had a diminished return on the visuals.
All in all, it’s rather surprising, and certainly doesn’t help