![]() This week, the baton of justification has evidently been passed to CFO Blake Jorgensen. At the same conference, GameSpot reported him stating that “There is no weakness that is perceptible yet in the title,” and expressed his surprise that the game had been described as under-performing. It sounds an awful lot like Moore is approaching gamers as careless consumers to be duped into giving EA money, and that their feedback does not matter so long as the game meets sales expectations, which it is unfortunately on track to do. “There are a lot of single player opportunities within the game,” he insisted, “It’s lacking a campaign mode in the eyes of gamers, but it’s got co-op, couch play…it’s not a purely multiplayer game.” I noted it at the time, but I’m still not certain what Moore could possibly mean by “…in the eyes of gamers,” except that the setting in which he made this comment was largely a business one. Moore doubled-down on his out-of-touch rhetoric last week, when he spoke about the game’s success and future at the Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. These comments revealed that EA DICE had chosen the easy way out by rejecting the notion that such content was expected. Our own Nick Calandra wrote an op-ed pointing out that the overwhelming feedback aimed at multiplayer games has been to improve the often sub-par single-player experiences, not to remove them completely. Only a few days later, COO Peter Moore made the first of multiple comments that rubbed us the wrong way when he said in an interview with GameSpot that “Very few people actually play the single-player on these kinds of games.” Moore claimed that he had sufficient data to draw this conclusion, but never bothered to cite it, and frankly the damage was already done. On the contrary, with the state of online play as it was during the PS2’s lifetime, I would hardly pin the games’ multiplayer capabilities as their legacy. And then there was Galactic Conquest, an alternative campaign mode which played like a strategic board game on the surface and included numerous planetary and space battle opportunities. Either that, or I imagined the many hours of my teenage years (and some of my 20’s, for that matter) spent on the Rise of the Empire campaign, a story of the 501st legion that spans a significant portion of both the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War. However, Ingvarsdottir’s recollection of the series is substantially different than my own. “As we concepted the game and thought about the legacy of the previous Battlefront games–they didn’t really have campaigns, they’ve always been predominately a multiplayer franchise.” She was of course referring to the well-loved Pandemic Studios franchise, Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefront II. Starting back in August, senior producer Sigurlina Ingvarsdottir made an interesting claim while explaining the omission of a campaign mode from Battlefront. Lets take a look at the lengthy list of reasons why. The issue at hand is only the game itself to some small extent the truth is, EA is out of touch with the gaming community, and especially those players that we serve. The lack of meaningful content in the core game has been the loudest and most widespread criticism of Star Wars Battlefront, and various EA representatives have taken turns trying to justify this in ways that condescend to our readers. ![]() The answer, you will find, is that EA can’t stop putting its foot in its mouth over the whole issue. All of this of course begs the question: why are we still talking about this? For these reasons, the highly-anticipated title made our Biggest Disappointments of 2015 on two accounts. ![]() Since the release of the game on November 17th, we have largely come to the conclusion that this is quite simply a multiplayer engine, with the only single-player opportunities being hollow and short-lived. Initially, it was our hope that the game would include a campaign mode, and when that rumor was dispelled, we held out hope that the single-player Missions mode would be worth playing. ![]() We here at Only Single Player have spent a surprising amount of time talking about EA DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront, a game that has virtually no single-player content. ![]()
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