Star Wars: Battlefront is only five months away. Which platform are you most likely to play it on?

I'd get it on PC for sure. That said I've been following this game extremely closely. I've watched about 20 or so gameplay videos and talked with NDA breakers on Reddit and I am still a bit concerned. Don't get me wrong this game looks amazing and as a person with a literal Star Wars shelf in his room and a Battlefield fan this should be my game.

The thing is the more small details come out the more it feels like in making a game for everyone they've missed some things that made DICE's previous games so good.

I am basically not sold that power ups are a good design decision for a game with depth. I made a big Reddit post about it but I'm a little worried that they're going too broad and will end up with too shallow an experience for people who like to stick with a videogame and get serious.

I admit we haven't seen all the game has to offer but after Titanfall I know the risks of assuming their will be more than what you see.

@mb Could you make the images into that cute small neat little side by side gallery?

In the past year or so I have learnt caution. I will not buy any PC game until it's been out for a week. Then I'll get it after it's been patched if there are problems.

Also the Screenshot's aren't impressive, there's basically nothing on screen. THAT lighting solution though, DAMN SON! Still it's nothing compared to our lord and saviour of Realtime Architectural Visualisation (which is an unfair comparison): Koola

ps4 cause THATS ALL I GOT MAN.

@hayt: I definitely haven't payed as close attention to the game as you have, that's for sure. I mainly just think it looks incredible and I love Star Wars, so I'm interested in it. I haven't preordered or anything that drastic, though.

What do you think Battlefront is missing that made DICE's other games so good? (keep in mind that I also skipped Battlefield 4 and barely played any BF3 at all, either.)

@mb: Yeah I feel I should couch all my comments in my belief that this looks like the best Star Wars shooter since Jedi Knight.

My core is that a lot of the systems seem quite simple. The flight model is single stick/mouse so that players don't need to worry about rolling and pitching but it means that while anyone can fly without crashing into the ground in 10 seconds it also means the maneuvers you can make are more limited. They attempt to address this by having a button for instant Immelman like in Star Fox. They have said the flight model is not complete but again, I can only focus on what we have not what we might have.

I am cool with a classless system so long as there are some restrictions for balance but power ups feed into the classless system in an odd way. So say the Imperial team has a few AT-STs and is cleaning up, not an uncommon scenario in these sorts of games (although normally they are tanks). In Battlefield or Battlefront of old, you could respond tactically to this situation by respawning as an engineer/AT guy and encouraging the team to do the same. However the primary AT weapon in the Alpha is the Smart Missile (same thing you see in the E3 trailer) which is a power up. This means the tactical response to being overwhelmed with armour is to have people hunt for the power ups on the map and hope they get the smart missile as power ups are both randomly placed and have a random power up (with some balances, you wont see 10 ATST power ups on the field at once). I understand that divorcing antitank ability from class or loadout allows anyone to deal with armour but it comes at the cost of a bit of depth.

Vehicles as power ups are a whole other kettle of fish. DICE pr people on Reddit have given a vague indication that maybe they are only power ups in Walker Assault (the Rush style mode from E3 and the Alpha) so maybe this will only apply to that mode. I feel like this designed as a solution to the problem of having players waiting at the base for the vehicle to respawn and potentially the "problem" (I'd call it another tactic) of stealing enemy vehicles (hell, Chewie racks an ATST in RotJ). By removing vehicles from the world and placing them in power up tokens you get people out of the base. However it doesn't solve the core problem of vehicle hungry people not participating in the fight as they will instead hang out at the power up spawns. In fact it could even be worse in that they will stay at these spawns until they get the power they want, keeping them uninvolved longer than a vehicle might take to pop back in at the base. As for solving asset thief I think it's pretty inelegant. Keeping them in world but making the opposing team unable to use them would solve the same problem; DICE even uses this in the Alpha as Imperial players cannot use Rebel stationary guns.

Tying vehicles to something so random again removes a layer of tactical depth becauss you cant count on them. You cant say "okay we'll send each of our 2 ATSTs to each control point" because you might not have two, or you'll get two but not at the same time, or you'll get 3 all at once. It makes for fun twists of fate I'll admit to suddenly digivolve from a Storm trooper to a walking tank but at the cost of higher level play. I know that kids love their Star Wars but acting like kids cant learn complex systems is unwise and slightly insulting. I am young enough to have been 12 when Battlefield 1942 came out and it changed my shit.

Also power ups look so terrible and out of place. For a game that is so eroticaly detailed to have giant floating tokens just takes me out of the moment. Yes they need to be visible but make them a box with a UI icon over them or something. Throw me a bone here.

It seems, and maybe I'm cynical, that they've omitted systems simply to prevent people from saying "it's Star Wars Battlefield" (a hilarious claim at its core considering how derivative of Battlefield the original Battlefront was) at the cost of meaningful complexity.

I have other niggles (having 1st and 3rd on toggle causes balance issues, should be locked based on server) but that's at the core. It's easy to come off as shitting on it but it comes from a place of love. I want this game to be the greatest Star Wars shooter, not "just" a great one.

How many days hours minutes and seconds tho

*FIVE MONTHS TO STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT*

PC, my PC friends and I have been yearning for a new multiplayer game for about a year now. We were always Battlefield nuts but then BF4 fucked everything up and Hardline looked weak. This looks like BC2 in Star Wars to me and BC2 is the game we got the most out of in terms of the battlefields from last gen and the current gen.

Let's just hope DICE returns to form after the disaster that was BF4.

I like Star Wars, but I'm probably not going to play this. When I think of Star Wars I think of the characters and the adventure. Pretty much all the games are missing the point.

Not really a multiplayer type of person. I passed on Titanfall and may pass on this as well, even though I enjoy star wars very much.

Impressive looking game but don't really think my cup o' tea.

I'm not really interested in a non-narrative driven Star Wars game, so I most likely won't be getting this. But I'm totally down for whatever that Star Wars game Amy Hennig is working on.

Same. I just hope it won't rely too much on Star Wars tropes. Uncharted kind of gives me that expectation.

Is there going to be a beta for all players? That's probably the only way I'll know if I actually want to buy this or not (even so, $80 is a bit steep, so even then, I don't know).

Probably wont last long but this is some of the best looking gameplay I've seen. Probably because it's missing the pretty poor looking WIP UI but boy does this game look and sound right and this is coming from someone that much prefers 1st to 3rd.

Had there been a PS3 version I would probably have picked it up out of curiosity. As it is, my PC couldn't run the Hardline beta, so I doubt it would handle Battlefront, and I'm not interested enough in this nor any other games which my PC can't run to consider upgrading quite yet.

If I ever get an Xbox One or PS4 I'd consider buying it, but acquiring any new console beyond the Wii U isn't very high on my priority list at the moment.

So I voted H.

@hayt: Man, I had been pretty dark on the game, but excited to see how it turns out, maybe buying it if it ends up being good. After your post, I'm far more dubious about the whole thing. No classes and most weapons and vehicles handed out through powerups seems nothing like Battlefront. Maybe it will work out in the end, or they'll have a separate "hardcore" playlist/version of each game mode or something, but for now it sounds weird. The game will probably still be pretty good, but it doesn't sound much like the old ones.

PC. If I'm playing a multiplayer game it needs to run at a consistent 60fps to not feel like garbage, and going by that PS4 stage demo at E3 there is nothing consistent about the framerate on the console version.

I'm interested, but unsure if I'll buy it. As a huge Star Wars fan playing a game in that universe rendered with this fidelity is super exciting. I just don't play very many online shooters and I'm not sure how much value this game has for me. If I do end up buying it this year it'll probably be on Xbox One. Or, maybe I'll just wait for that Amy Hennig Star Wars Uncharted game.

"I'm interested in the game, but not sure if I'm going to buy it or not"

My question is whether this will feel like something built from the ground up to be a Star Wars game, or just a reskinned Battlefield. From everything I've seen so far I'm leaning towards the latter, but still interested to see how it turns out in the end.

Man, after watching that youtube embeded video... this looks nothing like the older battlefields. Every person has a jetpack, there are hardly any soldiers on the field, and vehicles are pickups? Can you even exit the vehicles once you summon them? Would there be any point to? This just seems disappointing. Will keep an eye on the game.

This doesn't look like my thing and I've bee mildly turned off by what I've seen so far. If I were to get it it would be on PC.

That seems very unlikely though given my other options (Metal Gear Solid V, Persona 5, Just Cause 3, XCOM 2, etc) this fall.

I havnt played a Battlefield game since the letdown of Battlefield 2 but when they add Star Wars to the mix im in again. I will probably go for the PC but who knows, i love my PS4 aswell.

I'll probably be the owner of a next-gen console by the time this game comes out, but chances are I'll still be buying this on the PC. I paid for a 970, after all, I should probably get the best-looking games on PC.

Battlefield 2 was a letdown? I was under the impression that BF2 was the yardstick by which all old-school Battlefield fans measured DICE games.

It is by far the best Battlefield. If Battlefront is just a reskin of Battlefield 3 or 4, which I am sure it will be, I am not buying it.

I'm a little disappointed that they're not doing a proper campaign. Battlefield 3 & 4's weren't great by any means, but they were a solid technical showcase and a decent way to get to grips with the game. Even so, this looks terrific and I could definitely go for another Battlefield-like.

Still not sure what platform to go with. My ability to be effective in shooters with a keyboard and mouse has atrophied to the point of uselessness and I fucking despise the Battlelog launcher so I'm leaning towards the console version, but those PC screenshots look pretty good...

Well not all old-school fans but the majority of them probably :)

Im a big sucker for WW2 shooters, i stopped playing CoD at the launch of CoD 4 aswell.

It is, Isn't it?. BF2 was amazing...

There isn't a lot going on in the screenshots, but maaaan those are some pretty looking rocks.

They should port a BF4 map over to this just for funnsies like Parcel Storm or something.

Those environments look nice. I played the two-player splitscreen horde mode thing at E3 on a PS4 and it looked pretty good there, too.

One of the poll options should be... "The system where the game functions properly on"

Sadly that isn't even a joke.

Also people seem to be excited just because this is a Star Wars game. EA hasn't talked at all about the gameplay. So far it just seems like the world's most expensive Battlefield mod.

@poser: Well they showed a great deal of gameplay at the E3 didnt they?

I think I will be playing this game on PC because I dont think that the console versions will have as many people battling each other as on the PC version.

Well at least in battlefield games I seem to remember that you cant have as many players on console than on PC. Kinda suspecting that the same will be true for Battlefront.

Battlefield 4 and Hardline on current gen consoles had the same player cap as the PC version. DICE have already confirmed that Battlefront will support 40 players on both consoles on PC.

PC if I was to get it for anything, but I'm not sold on it yet.

It'll probably be PS4 for me, hope the performance isn't... dicey.

If those visuals hold up on the consoles I'll be getting it for the Xbox One most likely.

Those screenshots looks really good. Wish you didn't have to open them in a new tab on Giant Bomb to see them in full resolution though. That terrain looks really detailed and feels like the Star Wars universe.

I'm really excited to play this on PC. I don't pre-order games anymore, so I'll be picking it up at or after launch if folks say it runs good.

First I'll wait and see if they messed it up in some way. And I don't mean just the technical side of things.
While playing Bf3 I realised that people who did not have Bf Premium were effectively second-class citizens. So when Bf4 came out I made sure to get both the game and Bf Premium. (Not paying more than the price of the base game of course.)

But then I realised there were other things about the Bf formula that went wrong. The 'optimal way to play' was just not fun at all. It usually involved getting together with at least 3 friends/a full squad and then just rushing from capture point to capture point. With some luck there was a squad on the opposing team doing exactly the same so you'd get this odd parallel gameplay where 2 squads are rushing from point to point while everyone else is just playing the game as if it's deathmatch.
Getting more than 1 or 2 squads working together was incredibly rare, getting 32 people working together was next to impossible even on servers where people played the objectives.

Between the myriad of technical flaws, the scummy premium bonuses and battlepacks, the way battlelog worked and how it pressured you to optimise and compete and the gameplay problems I ended up quitting the game for good between the first and second DLC (at 200 hours played and max rank at the time), even though I had premium and there were still a lot of maps and unlocks to come.

Considering all the reasons I quit playing Bf4 it is going to take a lot for me to give Star Wars Battlefront a chance. From what I've seen it looks amazing but the problems I had with Bf4 and -to a lesser extent- Bf3 were definitely not related to their audiovisual qualities.

As for the platform, I have a lot of trouble even imagining playing these games on console. It just seems like an utterly terrible way to play. And I say this as someone who owns and has played quite a bit of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat on PS2.

I'm more likely to play this on PS4, but given Dice's track record it probably won't be within the first month or two.

@hassun: That's kind of how battlefield always is. In BF2 you would get lucky to have a commander and a squad or two actually cooperating, but for the most part people just do their own thing. I had a couple games in BF2 where there was large scale cooperation, but it was on the rare side.

is this a troll poll? pc duhh?

Hardline may support the same number of players as PC does, but the game has serious problems when the player count gets that high. In a 64 player match, Digital Foundry showed frame rates that dropped down into the 40s and frame drops as high as 10%. One definitely needs to look at the big picture when comparing across platforms like that.

The Xbox One version of Hardline runs at 1280x720 and the PS4 version is 1600x900, too, if that matters to anyone. Both versions still suffer from bad texture pop-in and low quality SSAO that isn't an issue on PC, either. I really do hope that the console versions of Battlefront are better than that.

@mb said:

Oh, yeah, no doubt. Battlefield 4 was even worse; on PS4, you'd regularly see drops into the 20s on certain maps, especially when that Levolution bullshit kicked in. They eventually patched it so that performance was more consistent, but at launch it was all over the place. It makes me think they should add a 30Hz frame rate cap for 64-player Conquest matches. I wished I liked playing Battlefield on PC more, because those versions look so much better in motion.

I will buy it on PC AFTER it's out just make sure it's not broken.

Please don't be shit. Please just make a battlefield game that isn't shit. I don't care what it looks like, just please don't be BF3 or 4 or hardline. There better not be a fucking battlefront log, or premium.

PC, if it isn't shit.

@ssully: Oh sure it has always been hard to get good teamplay with larger teams. The way Bf has evolved has just made the problem more apparent and annoying.

I think the reduced role of commander is part of that. At least in BF2 the commander could spam the shit out of squad leaders. BF4 didn't have nearly as good commander controls.

I played almost every single multiplayer online game the last generation on the xbox 360 but after Microsoft decided that my country ( Sweden ) was a 2nd tier country I went with the PS4 so I hope to see some of you duders online!