An Retrospective Look at The Star Wars: Battlefront II (2017) Controversy From A Neutral Observer GethN7 Follow Nov 28, 2017 · 5 min read

Before I continue with this article proper, I would like to make clear I am essentially neutral on Star Wars as a franchise. I’m only casually aware of the plot of the movies, and otherwise uninterested in it as a franchise, and this will attempt to look at both sides of the controversy over this game from a third party view.

That said, the 2017 incarnation of this game has come under a crapload of fire from multiple venues, including having earned it’s company the lowest ever ranking response to ever feature on Reddit in response to the backlash, and the complaints stem from predatory monetization schemes (aka “loot boxes”) and a lackluster campaign mode, with the former complaint being the worst of the two, to the point it has been considered a pernicious form of gambling by some legal jurisdictions.

For those not aware, loot boxes are content one can buy for the game (now disabled due to backlash) with real world money via a micro-transaction model to add new characters and other gameplay content, and while one could forego this and “grind” in-game for the content instead, it has been estimated it could take several months to acquire it all via the latter methods, while the former method could take hundreds if not thousands of dollars on top of the base purchase price to obtain everything, since the “loot boxes” are randomized.

Similar “loot boxes” exist in games like “Overwatch”, though that game generally puts content not essential to gameplay behind that model, like skins and recolors.

Before I cover how both the detractors and defenders of the game view the above complaints, my take on microtransactions is as follows:

Microtransactions are a model of gameplay common to mobile games and online games in general, and this can range from merely allowing the player to “speed up” gameplay progress by paying real world money, to essentially crippling the game to the point the player will be disadvantaged compared to other players unless they are willing to spend lots of real world currency to unlock game content.

The former idea is generally regarded as acceptable or at least tolerable by most gamers, as is the case with the game “Metal Gear Solid V: The Phntom Pain”, in which one could spend money on “MB Coins” to hasten gameplay like base building, but was not required and speaking as a player of that game, I have never done this, and I found the occasional coins handed out for free by Konami themselves to be more than sufficient for enjoying the game.

It was somewhat less well regarded in the game “Deus Ex: Mankind Divided”, where it was essentially tacked on as an afterthought feature late in development, and while not necessary to beat the game, it’s multiplayer features made use of this to the point they were fairly tedious unless one was willing to spend money on this.

In these cases, though, the transactions were generally for discrete items, not randomized, so the player knew what they would be paying for.

For a more tedious and less reasonable model similar to the SW: BF2 model, the game “Fallout Shelter” comes to mind, in which the player can pay for “lunchboxes”, which contain randomized items that can help the player, though the randomization is such that this can be a very expensive enterprise with somewhat underwhelming gains, depending on luck, effectively forcing the player to gamble their real world currency will gain them high quality gameplay bonuses via these transactions.

However, even this model is not nearly as terrible as the BF2 model, since it is still possible to obtain many if not all things you’d have to pay money for, you’d just have to work a little for it using ingame resources, and having played it, it would take less time on average.

However, the model used by Battlefront II (2017) was so pernicious almost all content players would ordinarily assume would be easily unlockable in-game was gated behind this micro-transaction model, and failing that, one would have to grind for days to weeks of real world time (barring eating, sleeping, and bathroom breaks) to unlock the mass majority of content.

Having played “Fallout Shelter”, despite having a similar model, it often handed out “lootboxes” for free doing ingame acts that required no real world money, and even without doing this, many things could be obtained via legitimate gameplay methods that did not involve literal real world days of constant play.

BF2 however (before EA disabled this due to controversy), either forces the player to pay huge amounts of IRL cash for randomized unlocks, or forces the player to tediously grind for real world days, weeks, and even months to unlock content one would assume could be unlocked much more easily for fulfilling certain ingame conditions like clearing the campaign, getting as certain number of kills, and other such methods.

I have spoken with parties vehemently negative and positive about this game, and below is their take in overall summary on whether this game was worth it.

NEGATIVE: The game has a short campaign with bad writing, locks basically everything behind microtransactions or literal months of grinding, and overall is not worth it.

POSITIVE: The game does have an admittedly tedious microtransaction model, and unless you have money to blow, it’s not worth doing so to unlock content, you’d be better off grinding for it provided you have the time. The writing is a bit weak, but if you do like a game where the main draw is constantly playing to unlock new content and are a hardcore Star Wars fan, it’s worth paying the INITIAL base game price and you won’t regret the purchase, but beyond that you likely won’t like this game otherwise.

Since even the positive commentary has little good to say about the micro-transaction model EA Games has disabled for the time being, and the weak campaign complaints are accorded some merits even by the defenders of this game, I would find it fair to say the controversy over this game has a fair degree of truth to it.

In closing, I would also like to add I consider “loot boxes” a form of digital gambling by definition, since unlike DLC packs, you are paying for randomized content, not discrete items with real world money, and since it’s up to chance whether you get what you need or want in exchange for real world money, I would definitely call it a form of gambling and a bad business practice, especially as has been done to the extent EA initially implemented it.

As to the merits of the game itself beyond this, I will leave that to players and those more familiar with the franchise given my inexperience with it.