The core of the game at launch was the Lightside and Darkside battles where gear could be farmed, and Lightside and Darkside Hard Mode where with the same energy, you could farm character shards as the primary form of character rarity progression. Chromiums weren’t divided into Lightside and Darkside options since there were significantly less characters at launch, and nodes could only be simmed one at a time instead of multi-simmed. It was largely a stripped down experience to make it out by the theatrical release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens which debuted December 18, 2015.

The meta king of Global Launch was mismatched teams that never shared the faction tags that are now common under CG’s current design philosophy. Evasion was the key stat, and the Arena was an RNG fest of who’s Old Ben/Darth Sidious lead team would annoy the opponent into submission. It was also common to see Barriss lead four healer teams that would force timeout if RNG didn’t go the players way.

The splash screen and global launch trailer featured an Empire Strikes Back skin of Luke Skywalker that was noticeably missing in game. This was a common contention that CG provided A New Hope Luke simply named Luke Skywalker with a rifle instead of a saber that would later be called Luke Skywalker (Farmboy). The ESB Luke featured on the splash screen would not be available till August 10, 2017-- almost two years after the games release. This common contention that many fan favorite characters were simply unreleased or worse worthless in game was one of the biggest early challenges for CG to overcome. From launch, this has to be the greatest area of improvement for CG.