Star Wars Battlefront—shooters that put you in the shoes of an ordinary schmuck in the midst of large-scale battles across the galaxy—is a cursed series. While games like Fallen Order are getting sequels and critical acclaim, every attempt to revive Battlefront since 2005's Battlefront 2 has run into one controversy or another. Last time it was the "pride and accomplishment" fiasco, and this time it's the botched launch of the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, a remastered bundle of the original two games from 2004 and 2005.
It seems like a slam dunk – give the boomers a hit of nostalgia and make some easy money. Backlash has pushed the game's Steam reviews into "overwhelmingly negative" territory after just two days on the market, with detractors seeming to focus mostly on the game's broken multiplayer, as well as several missing details from the original versions. In Battlefront 1, for instance, half of the cutscenes from the single-player campaign mode are straight-up missing. In addition, Aspyr – the studio tasked with porting the games by EA, the IP holder – only had 3 laggy servers running on launch day (or roughly 200 player slots) for the approximately 10,000 players who jumped in. Issues like these have only compounded, serving as a death by a thousand cuts.
Is it still going to give you more or less the same experience you had in college? Probably, if you look past those details. But with players leaving in droves, you might be better off going back to the original release.
