Star Wars Battlefront II Might Have A Season Pass After All
Over the weekend, Electronic Arts and DICE unveiled Star Wars Battlefront II.
During a panel at the Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, developers discussed some of the new features coming to the first-person shooter coming this November, and it's basically got everything that players wanted from the sequel. Space battles? Check. A single-player campaign? Yup. Levels, vehicles, and characters from every Star Wars timeline? Battlefront II has those, too.
A new method of delivering downloadable content, which forgoes the traditional "season pass" model in favor of something that won't split the community? Not so fast.
In a discussion with Mashable, Battlefront II creative director Bernd Diemer said, "We don't have a season pass." He followed up by explaining, "When we looked at the way Battlefront had evolved over its lifetime, with the DLC and everything, we decided, 'You know what? For this type of game, season passes are not the best thing. We need to [take it apart] and come up with something better.'"
Specifically, Diemer said, season passes tend to fragment the player base, as people who buy maps through season passes or downloadable content can play on the new levels but people who only have the base game can't. The big selling point of Battlefront (aside from the Star Wars license) is its giant multiplayer matches. If there's nobody playing in those modes, it defeats the whole purpose of the game. Given that the gaming community tends to not like DLC, fans enthusiastically commended the bold approach to new content in Battlefront II.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Shortly after the interview, EA asked Mashable to withhold the information about the season pass plans, and issued an addendum to Diemer's remarks. "While we're not ready to confirm any live service plans just yet, what we can say is this we heard the feedback from our Battlefront community loud and clear."
In other words, don't start celebrating yet. Star Wars is an expensive license and one with a lot of profit potential, and it seems like EA is still figuring out how to best monetize the new Battlefront experience. Most likely, the game will come with some form of DLC (EA is already hawking pre-order bonuses and content-filled special editions). Whether that's a season pass or something else remains to be seen.