Battlefront Beta: Day 1 · 8:46pm Oct 8th, 2015
Well, as I hoped to, I spent about two hours with Star Wars Battlefront before work, and here are my Day 1 impressions.
First off, the game is as every bit visually stunning as the previews have shown. It pushes my 970 all the way to 80*C, but it holds a steady 100 fps, and I must give props to DICE for being the VERY FIRST GAME to properly identify my card and tweak the settings accordingly. Every other game I've had to go in manually and set things to high and correctly set the resolution.
Level 1's need more gear, no questions asked. I started up the game, and had nothing but my primary blaster, and had to endure a string of defeats against better-equipped players. That is NOT fun, and newbies won't stick around. Give Level 1's SOME semblance of choice for their starting loadouts.
Random. Spawns. Dear sweet Celestia DICE, random spawn areas. It's only hour 5 of Day 1, and players have already figured out how to camp the spawn areas.
Walker Assault is a bit unbalanced. I had a stunning last-second victory as the rebels, and another very, very close defeat as the rebels. But every victory as the empire has been a steamroll. The rebels have to coordinate so much more to attack the walkers than the empire has to in order to defend them.
The fantastic news is single-player Survival is hella fun. So tense playing cat and mouse with an AT-ST in the canyons of Tattooine.
But as much as it pains me to say this, no, I don't think this has the staying power to stand up to Halo and CoD come November. It's too similar to Battlefield, and not similar enough to Battlefront 1 and 2. I'm sensing most publications will be giving this 7's and 8's out of 10.
It's only the first day, I'm almost at Level 5 (the max) but I look forward to playing more over the weekend.
But, let's see if it keeps me hooked all the way to day 3 or 4.
Gonna play it with a friend of mine this weekend. Hopefully it's good enough to keep me interested. Don't really want to abandon another franchise from my childhood like I did Mercenaries and Halo.