Star Wars Battlefront beta preview

It’s Star Wars, so chances are you’ve already bought Battlefront and are frantically reading any information you can on it. Without wasting too many words, here’s the video of my first multiplayer round, after a few play tests in single play mode.

Great, now that you see how horrible at multiplayer games I am…

Techy Stuff

Let’s get the tech out of the way.

I have an older computer system, which was built with the future in mind. Asus Rampage Extreme IV motherboard. Intel i7-3820 and 16 gigs RAM. Nothing impressive, it does the job. Video card is a single ASUS built GTX 980 with 4 gigs onboard RAM. Which, quite honestly is not a lot these days.

Star Wars Battlefront ran smooth at default 1080p resolution and ultimate settings. Frames per Second (fps) was hovering in the 85-90 range. Animations were silky smooth and everything looked real nice.

Star Wars Battlefront slowed to about 60fps at 2560×1440 and 26-32fps at full 4k resolutions. Needless to say the game performed beautifully at all resolutions. It did have stuttering from time to time in 4k, but a video card with 8 gigs ram would possibly fix that.

Gameplay

Moving on from the geek stuff, Star Wars Battlefront is a First Person Shooter on a “large” (40 players per map) multiplayer scale. This theme has been done 100 times in the past and will be copied to eternity.  I really wish though, that EA copied the Tribes/Planetside formula here. It’s there in elements, but small fragments of a really fantastic game style.

My first glance at Star Wars Battlefront was Tatooine, a planet that’s quite overdone in a flourishing universe with a vast variety of other planets. But this time was different for me. Tatooine actually looked nice. Bone fragments littered the area. Rocks were nicely textured and the canyon the map was based on looked nice. Finally! Tatooine was more than an endless, depressing desert. I just hope Hoth (the other overdone and quite boring planet) can look just as pretty. Combat with the ATST was the most exciting part about this single player, enemy waves map. Though this is beta and everything was greatly restricted…

After seeing how Star Wars Battlefront performed I jumped right into multiplayer. Ripe and ready to get my virtual ass handed to me on a repeated basis. There was no letdown here. Play was smooth and getting shot could almost be felt through the game. The only mission type available was the tried and true capture mission. In this case it was escape pods (why?) Go to pod, claim it and wait till the capture is complete. It was a basic mechanic to get the scattered players into the same area to shoot each other without much of a search. It worked well, I was always in the right place at the right time to get shot.

In the end, it’s Battlefield with a Star Wars skin. Not that it’s a bad thing, the engine is well optimized and the graphics look spectacular. It gives way for a nice weekend distraction. Your in game character still levels up similar to Titanfall, but there’s little to worry. you can jump in whenever and enjoy the game, not being too far behind. The casual ability is what many games lack in the modern hardcore era.

I’d say buy this game, play it when you can, but overall, just have fun.