Wazanator

Not sure what you are getting at I actually really liked the hero mode in 2 and I hope this game also gets a one off level where you can just play as whatever hero you want and duke it out with all the other hero playing players. My concern is that this game is distancing itself so much from some of the finer details that added a lot of charm and things to break the rules of what the developers wanted you to do that allowed you to create your own fun with friends. This new Battlefront has good looking production value but it is missing the spirit of what made Pandemic Studios stand out so well.

Graphically speaking this game looks great and the sound work is amazing.

Gameplay wise I'm not sure I like what I've seen. Granted I haven't kept up to date with this game but just from this video alone there's numerous things that are rubbing me the wrong way. Health recovery (also not digging the look of the health bar), unlimited ammo, space bucks to gate content (even if it is currency you earn in game I don't feel like it belongs in this type of game as it means 6 months from release any new players that join are going to get destroyed by players who have everything), mini map is lacking of useful geographic detail, screen wipe transition gets old fast after each death, no immediate transition between getting in and getting out of vehicles, not to mention you don't even walk up to a spacecraft, lift off and fly out of a hangar you get on your comm unit and call one in and it just magically spawns already flying in the air, and to top it off it has a power up system.

I'm sure the game is fun to some but to me this is not the battlefront I wanted. Unlimited ammo and health regen sounds like it is asking for a camping issues. Some of the best moments I had in Battlefront 1 and 2 was running low on health and ammo while trying to take a point, neutralizing it and hoping that no one else would show up and finish me off. On top of that some of the most fun I had while playing was trying to sneak into the enemy base and steal one of their space ships it doesn't even look like you can do that in this game.

The fact that Kickstarter gets it's money regardless of whether or not the project comes to fruition and the fact they have so far done absolutely nothing in terms of helping out backers track down people who run off with the money is setting off some serious red flags. If you setup a campaign through Kickstarter they require you to provide information that one would consider enough to track you down and one would hope that Kickstarter is verifying this information properly prior to giving them the greenlight on making the campaign go live. If I wanted to right now I could go hire some artist to make mockup shots for a platformer, put it up on Kickstarter and hype it up then vanish with the cash and I would have no negative repercussion because I know Kickstarter isn't going to do anything to help the backers track me down and they themselves are not going to either.

I think the idea behind crowdsourcing is great but right now there are not enough rules in place to properly control it. If you think about it fake crowdsourcing campaigns are the new charity donation scam. Look at projects like Clang, that campaign raised over half a million then what came out of it was garbage and they asked for more money before finally saying "games cancelled". If someone with a notable name had not been attached to that project one would assume that they quickly made a demo along with a reason as to why they had to cancel then ran off with the money leaving their backers to think that they tried but it just didn't work out.

To me the idea that Kickstarter has no skin in the game so to speak and makes no effort at all to stop scams or crack down on them is making me hesitant to ever even consider using their service.

I definitely want to write up a more detailed post about this game but seeing as it's 3 AM and I just finished it I will say that as someone who has been a part of the Source modding/mapping scene for 5+ years now this game hits almost everything on the head for making it feel like you are playing someone's maps that they made with little experience and having them gradually improve over time (there's some really good intentional beginner mistakes in that first map).

The only thing that I will knock against it is that it did not use enough stock textures or models. Almost anyone who is just coming into Source will not touch the model import pipeline because of how convoluted and easy to mess up it is. As soon that second map loaded and there was a custom gun model with firing animation my suspension of disbelief went out the window.