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Last night was my first look at EA Games' Star Wars: Battlefront II for the XBOX ONE.

This game is historic, in that a comment from EA on a Reddit thread received a Guinness world record- breaking 667,823 downvotes. EA's amazingly unpopular remark was in response to a complaint about how players were essentially coerced into paying to unlock Star Wars' most popular characters (like those from the original trilogy) and other powerful artifacts. ^{1  2} 

What followed should have been disastrous for EA Games. Many fans boycotted the game and EA. Business Insider reports that six months after it launched in late 2017, EA released an update which removed significant items from its "crates," leaving only items that would not affect gameplay. They also shut off all in-game microtransactions — which was huge business for EA the previous year. ³ 

How badly was EA burned by this? Game Revolution reported EA lost over $3BB in value by the end of November that year — the month the game was launched — and opined that suspending the microtransactions would nearly guarantee EA would consider the game a loss regardless of the number of copies it sold. (Subsequent reporting from Gamespot suggested that EA added the microtransactions back in a few months later, and that EA's revenue was up over 6% by the end of the fiscal year.) ^4 5

Bad business decisions aside, the game itself certainly has its pros and cons. Here's what I know so far:

PROS

• Graphics: The characters and ships look beautiful. They look light years better than they do in Star Wars: Battlefront played on the same machine and TV. At one point in the campaign, your character approaches and gets into a TIE fighter; the image looked so good it transported me back to 1978. And playing Kylo Ren was as smooth as melted milk chocolate.

• Campaign: I've played through the original campaign. I don't want to spoil anything here, but I feel EA did a good job using the plot to give players a wide variety of scenarios to play in.

CONS

• Characters: Luke Skywalker does not really resemble Mark Hamill. Recreating faces must be insanely difficult, but I think this one is super important to get right, being the hero of the entire Star Wars brand.

• Prompts: The smaller white text is nearly illegible, and placed against light backgrounds at times. Even wearing my new glasses, I must stand in front of my television set to read instructions or descriptions.

  
  What genius thought small silver text up against an alternating black and white background was a good idea?
  

• Bugs: When gameplay resumes on Pillio after the cut scene, Luke appears to fall into endless sky. The only way I found to avoid this was to skip the cut scene. (Problems following cut scenes happened more than once; both times, skipping the cut scene was the workaround.) Pictured above is the view of all of the objects I'd just earned from latest "crate" — they failed to appear on the screen. What really pisses me off about this is I didn't start this game until 2020 — EA has had nearly 3 years to patch stupid shit like this. Luke falling into endless sky right at the start of a scene seems a pretty obvious flaw. It smacks of negligence. Other bugs are catalogued below.

• Complex: The gameplay is involved. There's cards and crystals and a bunch of stuff I don't care about at all (see screenshot above). I'm glad these devices are here for the serious folk; but I'm not about to track all that shit. Besides, the text describing it all is too damn small for me to read anyway (same screenshot). Let me choose whether I want to get into all of that at the start.

Maybe I don't have a right to expect much, considering I bought the game for a small fraction of the standard price over a Black Friday weekend. On the other hand, Luke falling into endless sky probably wasn't a special feature for bargain hunters. People who shelled out the full $59.99 also got that dumb ass bug. So now I'm angry with EA for two reasons — one for their microgreed and the other for letting shitty product out on the market.

Does one scene with the star character falling forever and uncontrollably make Battlefront II a shitty product? In context, yes, it does: It's the first time the campaign player sees Skywalker. Up until that point, you've been playing a nobody — cool story, but still, the character was invented for the game; we haven't had 40 years to care about this character. So here's the first opportunity to control the star of the show, and he falls uncontrollably through the ground into oblivion. Epic fail.

Other than that? You know, it's a better product than Battlefront. The characters look beautiful, the ships look beautiful. I've flown a TIE fighter, I've flown an X-wing. I'm enjoying the gameplay. The game suffers from some design and really stupid QA issues, and I'm very concerned I'll find more as I continue the campaign. Having said that (and I despise that phrase), I'll likely update this post the more I play it, but my bottom line today: I can't believe people would still pay full price for this game approaching three years on, so don't. The frustration you'll experience with the bugs I've mention merits a discount anyway.

UPDATE: For what it's worth, I did attempt to file a bug report with EA. I wanted to talk with somebody to confirm that others have seen the bugs I've listed below. So I entered my contact information on the EA Support site and this what was returned:

"Visit Answers HQ"... which is a crowdsourced Q&A for bug reports. Like there's going to be a FAQ with a question that reads, "Why did EA not use Quality Assurance testers on Battlefront II?" Followed by an answer that would read, "EA lost interest in offering a quality gaming experience to fans of the most lucrative and universally recognized science fiction franchise ever. Once Redditors discovered we were out to screw them out of every dime we could to recoup the production costs, especially because we disconnected microtransactions altogether for months, we knew we would lose a lot of money. Be sure to buy Jedi: Fallen Order today!"

Honestly, there are 143 PAGES of bugs reported here. Seeing them all makes me wonder how long my bug list is going to get. Here's a thought, EA: Take some fucking responsibility for the shitty software you produce. Still, somebody is viewing the tweets I'm sending. The game sends every tweet with a pair of hashtags (I think one of them is "BattlefrontII"... maybe somebody at EA is seeing them.

UPDATE: Bug List

• On the screen one reaches after they've chosen to continue the campaign, my character appeared to suffer spasms: the lifelike, subtle movements one's character makes were dramatically accelerated, suggesting my character suffers from physical tics (insert twitch pun here).

• The X-wing mission to protect the bombers attacking the shield generators on the Imperial star destroyer started a few times with an obscenely overcaffeinated X-wing (jitters). Restarting the mission had no effect; my solution was to restart the XBOX. Space coffee is no joke.

• After the cut scene introducing Han Solo at Maz's castle, Solo is stuck at the entrance to a large room. Attempts to walk him actually lifts him up to the ceiling. Rotate him around to see beyond the walls to the scene outside. (This is the second problem I had operating the game following a cut scene.) Once I came back into the game after uploading the previous video to Twitter, I was able to move Solo around the room, although he moved more like Dr. House than Han Solo... including problems navigating the stairs. The workaround was to restart the mission and skip the cut scene.

• The disappearing crate contents? Happened again tonight. This time I captured video of it.   Here's another instance.   And another one.

• After resuming the game, the AT-ST I'm in suffers from the same uncontrollable jitter the X-wing did.

Upon completing the initial campaign, I was shown an offer for a downloadable content package with skins for characters up through the most recent Star Wars release.

No way in Hell I'm spending any more money on your shitty software, EA.