Star Wars: Battlefront (SW:B) had my attention from the moment I first heard of it. The game sounded like an attempt to migrate Battlefield 1942 (BF1942) into the Star Wars universe. What's not to love about that idea? I even got to play an advance version of the game at this year's E3, and it was indeed pretty sweet. The real question to be answered is whether the shipping game lives up to its potential.
SW:B really stands out in terms of its visuals. And I must say that none of the video clips released prior to the game did it justice. The sunlight streams through the trees in the forest. The icy environments look so good they almost bring a chill to the player, even looking through a block of ice is nicely distorted as it should be. And the special effects look like they've been lifted straight from the films. The explosions, motion blur, and everything else look almost good enough to be on the big screen. And that's to say nothing of the basics; i.e., the models, animation, and textures, all of which are beautifully done.
Perhaps the most immersive part of the visuals, though, is the ambient bits that adorn each mission. Star Destroyers haunt the skies over Geonosis. Amazing foliage and beautiful forests adorn Endor and Kashyyk. The hideous Sarlacc nests in the desert sands of Tatooine. The game's visuals are just so beautiful that staring at the skies and other bits of detail will surely get new players killed more than once. Count on it.
What's more, you won't need the world's fastest computer and video card to enjoy it. The developers have done a surprisingly good job at tuning the engine for the level of graphical detail it provides. On my relatively beefy system (Athlon 3000+ CPU, BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC video card, 2 GB of RAM), I can run the game at 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp with 8x anisotropic filtering (AF) and no hitches. Alternately, I can run at 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp and enjoy 2xQ anti-aliasing (AA) in addition to the 8x AF. Folks with even better hardware will likely be able to run at 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp with 4x AA and 8x AF, and that's makes for some stunning visuals!
I suppose I shouldn't forget to put in a plug for the cut scenes as well. The game features relevant snippets of the various films, both as lead-in footage prior to a battle and as a reward for finishing certain missions. The video is sharp and plays back smoothly. I'm not sure what codec or other technology the developers are using, but it's about the best looking video footage I've ever seen in a video game. It isn't quite as good as watching a DVD play back on my computer, but it's not too far from it.
In short, I have no complaints with the game's visuals. Its look is absolutely cutting edge in every respect, and it plays surprisingly well for as good as it looks. Truly, SW:B is a beautiful thing to look at.
I can't believe I'm saying this about a Star Wars game, but it's unavoidable: the audio isn't quite up to par. A minor complaint is that it seems difficult to get the various volumes well balanced, and more to the point the in-game voice work is always hard to hear. A worse complaint about voice work, however, is that the recorded dialogue for the mission briefings is clearly not done by the original actors and, far less excusable, is of relatively poor audio quality! Seriously, the briefings sound distorted, or compressed, or something similarly unnatural. And that's pretty weird for a Star Wars game.
An even more irritating complaint is that the sound effects sometimes fail to play. I've been killed before ever hearing the shots being fired behind me. I've watched comrades get shot down in perfect silence, only to hear their screams of death after they've already respawned. Even the little beeping sounds that play as the loading screen crosshairs zoom in on the location of the coming battle don't play at all in the multi-player aspect of the game. These things seem to me like relatively obvious problems, but they've yet to be acknowledged by the developers—even though the first patch has already been released.
It's truly a pity to find such niggling audio defects in a game whose production values are otherwise superb. The problems I've experienced are annoying enough that they genuinely detract from the experience of playing the game, and that's not good.
The interface is both familiar and unusual, but it is largely functional. The menu structure is pretty common, for the most part, but painting the menu options at an angle atop an interesting graphic backdrop is definitely something new. The interface for binding keys is a bit buggy—I was disturbed to find I could no longer configure bindings at all after accidentally assigning the left mouse button—but it's serviceable. The HUD elements are all the standard, useful stuff one expects post-BF1942, and they look pretty good to boot. My only real complaints involve the multi-player portion of the interface, but I'll save those for later.
What I absolutely must single out for praise is the map loading interface, because it's a nice innovation. Whereas virtually every other game I've ever played makes me stare at a largely static map loading screen, SW:B gives me a beautiful view of the galaxy, zooms into the system where the battle is to occur, then zooms onto the planet itself. It can get a bit old after a while, but this is a lot more pleasant to look at than the typical loading screen. And while I know the benefit is merely psychological—SW:B takes as long or longer to load than the other games I play—it seems to make the time pass more quickly. Nicely done, developers!
Yet almost as if they felt the need to balance that praise, the developers made getting into the game a royal pain. At startup it plays no less than four different movies, after which it takes the player to the profile selection screen. And as if that weren't bad enough, one still has to decide whether to log into GameSpy before finally getting to a list of servers. Count 'em, folks: just getting into a bloody server requires pressing escape four times, selecting a profile, and then fussing around with a login before the player even hits the server list; that's nuts! The game desperately needs some way to skip all that garbage, particularly if it's ever to work well with third-party server browsing tools.
The game mechanics are a mixed bag. On the one hand, SW:B clearly borrows from BF1942's "Conquest" game mode, fixing a couple of minor complaints in the process. The ability to switch between primary weapons and secondary devices is both simple and functional, and having only those four options cuts down on the confusion possible with BF1942. Yet on the other hand, the developers have done nothing to address the most fundamental problem with the game mechanics of BF1942, namely, spawn raping.
The way I see it, there are two different ways one could deal with the issue. Either one could tackle it in the game mechanics by the simple addition of a brief period of invulnerability at the spawn points, or one could handle it in the game's content by developing the maps in such a way that the spawn points are shielded from fire. Yet SW:B actually takes a step backward from BF1942 in both respects!
First, there's a brief delay while spawning before one's weapon appears and is ready to fire, and that delay is enough to get one killed if someone is spawn raping. At least in BF1942 the player spawns with his weapon ready to fire; not so in SW:B. And second, more of the control points in SW:B are not only out in the open, but are accessible from above as well! Any team that takes the high ground on the "Battle of Endor" map can just rain grenades, rockets, and withering fire down on a couple of the spawn points with near impunity. It is really hard for me to believe it, but SW:B is actually worse than BF1942 in this respect.
Another problem is that of occluded lines of fire. On too many occasions I blew myself up with rockets fired into something next to me because it didn't seem to be in my line of fire. To again reference the "Battle of Endor" map, for example, the hand railing on the Ewok walkways up into the huts stops the vast majority of outgoing fire. It's pretty silly watching blaster bolts spark on thin air; it's even worse when trying to fire a missile or throw a grenade. This is a problem that needs fixing.
Speaking of which, the movement code could also use some work. I've found far too many places where the player cannot walk up onto a step that looks to be a mere two to three inches in height. When those glitches occur, it's necessary either to jump up onto the small rise or back up and approach again from a perfectly perpendicular angle. I don't know what the problem is, but I've found myself stuck on the stupidest little protrusions on the ground. It reminds me of Ghost Recon, a game wherein elite commandos can't seem to walk up a two degree slope. No matter how you slice it, it's very irritating.
But perhaps the two most egregious complaints I can level involve two features that should have been pure gold: (1) heroes and (2) game balance. Regarding heroes, I remember the early press releases touting the ability to play as a light or dark Jedi in various missions. I guess the developers weren't able to find a way to make it work because you won't be playing as Jedi in SW:B, which is a serious disappointment. And to make matters worse, the inclusion of heroes such as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader is poorly implemented.
For example, they seem completely invulnerable. I've seen Darth Vader get tossed a good twenty feet or more straight up into the air without taking any damage. He simply falls to the ground, gets up, and continues on his killing spree. The same is the case with Luke Skywalker, who is completely impervious to fire from the huge AT-ATs (Imperial walkers) on the "Battle of Hoth" map. The only thing worse with the heroes is when they get stuck in a corner and stand stupidly facing the wall, swinging their light saber indefinitely at some unseen target. That really shatters the illusion.
As regards game balance, the inclusion of the Dark Trooper, who has a jet pack, is a really neat idea. But as anyone who has played in a Clone Wars battle will tell you, they completely unbalance the game. The droid armies routinely find control points falling far faster than anyone can get to them on foot, and then find themselves attacked on all sides as hordes of enemy troops descend from the air. Perhaps this wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the standard issue weapons for Dark Troopers kill any droid with a single shot. Granted, they fire slowly and are relatively hard to aim, but they're ridiculously effective against droids nevertheless. Perhaps this will be addressed in a patch. We'll see.
It's also clearly the case that certain sides dominate certain maps. In the big battle on Geonosis at the spire, for example, the Empire gets two of the biggest, toughest AT-TE tanks, one of which can tear through all the spider droids and hailfire droids on the map by itself, along with two republic gunships, one of which can slaughter both of the Geonosian fighters with ease. So let's see, the Empire has absolutely dominating vehicles, all of which respawn very quickly when lost, whereas the droid army has... uh... vehicles made of tissue paper? I've played that map at least three dozen times, and I've yet to see the droids win even once for a simple reason: they cannot stop the AT-TEs. I don't know what the developers were thinking. I guess maybe if the entire droid team does nothing but pelt them with missile launchers they'd be manageable, but then they'd be sitting ducks for all the Empire infantry.
In summary, even though the basic game mechanics are tried and true, the adaptation into the Star Wars universe suffers from a number of faults. They aren't a deal-breaker in themselves, at least as far as I'm concerned, but they do noticeably detract from play. The one truly positive thing I can say is that the addition of a specific pilot class really makes vehicle use a lot more effective than in other games. Because vehicles repair automatically when a pilot is inside, they don't suffer from the made-of-tissue-paper syndrome that plagues some other games (e.g., Unreal Tournament 2004), and yet they aren't so overwhelming as to dominate the game completely. It's a nice touch. But that's about the only serious step forward I've found in terms of game mechanics.
If you're one of the roughly four individuals in the world who haven't seen the Star Wars films then you'll be lost in the game, for it features very little exposition. For the rest of us, however, the relevant parts of the story are nicely conveyed by the environments and architecture. All of the settings from the Galactic Civil War seem like old friends to me, whereas all of the settings from the Clone Wars are at least nicely recognizable. The advertising campaign for the game touted the fact that the player would be able to live the battles he's watched for so long, and this is largely true. As such, I can forgive the relative lack of exposition.
The content soars to great heights and has only a couple of problems. First, the good stuff. I love the two different campaigns, each consisting of a nice number of very well designed missions. Not only are the missions well designed from a standpoint of game play, they do an absolutely fabulous job of putting the player right into the action from the movies. Being able to run through the grassland of Naboo, blasting the hell out of those irritating Gungans is truly a wonderful thing, but I think being able to drive an AT-AT might just be even better. Seriously, the content in this game is pure Star Wars crack, the kind of thing that addicts simply cannot get enough of to satiate their tastes.
And there's a lot of stuff in those missions as well. Each side has five classes, among which one finds the typical soldier and rocket soldier as well as more esoteric stuff like pilots and Wookies. Better still, each class is nicely designed and fun to play. I particularly like the way the sniper rifle works, granting an instant kill only to a head shot and requiring the sniper to lead the target by a fair bit if said target is moving. I could be wrong, but I don't think SW:B is going to suffer from sniper syndrome the way some other games have.
It would practically be a crime if I didn't also mention how positively cool the vehicles are. Driving an AT-AT on Hoth is simply not to be missed, and don't even get me started on the Hailfire Droid, those rolling-wheels vehicles featured on Geonosis. Though they aren't as cool as the movie version—I would much prefer to rip off dozens of missiles at a time rather than the mere 5 allowed in the game—they're still a blast to use. It's all here, folks: X-Wings, Y-Wing Bombers, Tie Fighters, Tie Bombers, Snowspeeders, AT-ATs, AT-STs, Spider Droids, AATs, Speeder Bikes, Tauntauns—you name it, Star Wars buffs, and it's probably in there. The developers definitely deserve big kudos for going to town with the vehicles.
But just because you're not moving doesn't mean you can't be deadly! All of the maps feature various sorts of gun emplacements as well. On Bespin (home to Lando's Cloud City), for example, players can use the huge, anti-aircraft guns to take down all the fighters, while other maps feature smaller, rotating gun turrets with shielding for the gunner. All such guns can be destroyed with relative ease, at least by troops with missiles, but they can also be rebuilt by troops with fusion cutters. You'll definitely need to know the fixed emplacements on a given map if you're to have any hope of victory.
And how could the game be a Star Wars game without droids? In what strikes me as a really neat idea, the developers have worked quite a few neutral droids into each map. The droids fall into a few different categories, each of which fulfills a different function. The stationary droids with spider-like arms are medical droids, which can repair any unit that comes into their radius. R2 units repair vehicles, "Gonk" droids provide ammunition, and so forth. They may seem like just another part of the beautiful scenery, but don't underestimate just how helpful they can be!
In the negative column, however, the artificial intelligence (AI) simply isn't up to snuff. All too often I've seen troops running into corners, humping the wall, refusing to return fire, and doing tons of other stupid things. Their idiocy wouldn't be so irritating were it not for the problems with the multi-player aspect of the game—about which more in a moment—but they manage to make some of the missions in the single-player game positively miserable.
The "Battle of Endor", for example, is exceedingly frustrating. Your idiot-AI-powered teammates are worse than useless, insofar as they don't bother to take control points and use up the scooter vehicles that are so crucial for making it behind enemy lines to the shield bunker. I gave up trying to beat that mission after the dozenth time my troops had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They're not as bad as the bots in BF1942, but they aren't anywhere near what they need to be to make the single-player aspect convincing.
As things stand, the game also has some crashing bugs that need to be ironed out. I've had it kick me back to the desktop a couple of times during map loading, and I've had a few other minor problems as well. The game's content is generally very good, but it does sport a few blemishes here and there.
This is where I really have to take out my red pen. I didn't like it that BF1942 shipped with a single-player aspect that was (and still remains today) horribly broken. But it wasn't enough to make me uninstall the game in disgust for one simple reason: BF1942 is primarily a multi-player game. The biggest problem with SW:B, hands down, is that the game is clearly intended to be primarily a multi-player game, yet the developers only made the single-player aspect work properly!
To be more specific, the multi-player aspect doesn't run well at all. And the problem isn't simply a matter of having a fast enough machine. No, the problem is that the developers stupidly tied the client-side frame rate to the server's network tick rate! Honestly, I can't even believe I'm writing this, but it's true. Those of you who understand what I'm saying, take the time to pick your jaws up from the floor while I explain it for everyone else.
Here's the simple version. The default server tick rate is 20 ticks/second. That means that the server updates each client connection 20 times/second. So far so good. But because the developers locked the client-side frame rate to the server's tick rate, that means that all of the clients update their screens no more than 20 times/second. In other words, the multi-player aspect is capped, by default, at a maximum of 20 frames per second (FPS), which is jerky as can be! What's that you say? The obvious solution is simply to crank up the server tick rate to something more sensible, say, 30 or 40 ticks/second?
Wrong. By default, SW:B requires 40 kbps for each client connection, which means that the game is sending roughly 5 KB of data to each client each second. If one cranks up the tick rate to 40, that will double the effective bandwidth required by each client. Doubling the tick rate would therefore mean that each client would consume a whopping 80 kbps! That means that even a dedicated server on a T1 line, assuming an optimistic 90% efficiency rating and zero packet loss, could support no more than 16 players in a server! In other words, server administrators have a simple choice: (1) run a server that plays like crap because the frame rate is too low, or (2) run a server that plays like crap because it's starved for bandwidth. Gee, some choice.
I cannot believe the developers did such a stupid thing, but I'll bet I can tell you why they did it. My guess is that they didn't bother to spend any time optimizing the game for the PC. Instead, they wrote it for various consoles where 20 FPS isn't such a big deal, given that they display images on a crappy, low-resolution television, and then just shafted the PC gamers with their console-oriented network code. This is the single greatest issue with the game, and it is nearly a deal-breaker in my view. Unless the developers de-couple the client-side frame rate from the server's tick rate, and that's pretty unlikely given that it would require quite a bit of re-writing the client-side network code, SW:B is forever crippled as a multi-player game—and not by accident, sadly enough, but by design!
For those who are fanatic enough about Star Wars to overlook that beauty of a problem, I'm sad to say there remains yet more bad news. First and arguably worst, the in-game browser sucks. Badly. Its screwy little ping icons don't get updated most of the time, the result being that the player has no good way to judge the ping of the various servers in the list. And there's absolutely no filtering at all; forget your dreams of being able to filter by campaign, map, bots, number of players, etc. And as if that weren't enough, it seems like the information that is displayed is wrong nearly half the time! I can't tell you how many times I've tried to join a server, only to be disconnected because the server no longer exists, is full, or something else. It's ridiculous!
And just to add insult to injury, it's not possible to join games using external tools instead. Every time I've tried to connect to a game in progress using xFire or the All Seeing Eye, I get the same thing. I end up hitting escape four times to bypass the ridiculous four opening movies, select my profile, select whether to log into GameSpy, and then... wait forever at the connecting screen. In short, the player is stuck with the terrible in-game browser, at least for now, and it's about as bad as they come.
| NB: | The v1.01 patch was released shortly after the review was written. On the one hand, it fixes the problem with using third-party server browsers, making it possible to use All Seeing Eye and GameSpy Arcade as well. Yet on the other hand, it actually screws up the in-game browser even more; now the information on the screen doesn't even update properly. Figures. Fortunately, the v1.10 patch, released a few weeks later, fixes some of the multi-player complaints. The client side frame rate is still stupidly locked to the server tick rate. The new spawn invulnerability is completely useless because you're prevented from firing until you're no longer invulnerable; so instead of an immediate spawn/die cycle, it's spawn/5-second-wait/die instead. Gee, big help. On the plus side, though, the multi-player browser is fixed and actually workable, and I haven't had nearly as much trouble getting into games. If only they would unlock the client-side frame rate, the game would rock! |
I hate to say it—I mean, I really hate to say it—but SW:B simply isn't a game I can recommend broadly right now. It's absolutely beautiful and is positively bursting with potential. The huge possibilities for fun in this game practically scream at the player constantly. But the multi-player aspect, the game's very raison d'être, is badly broken at the moment, and I rather doubt anything is going to be done about it. LucasArts has been entirely silent on the matter, and it's hard for me to believe that they would rip out the networking code completely and replace it with something that can handle prediction—the technique that pretty much every other game in existence uses to avoid locking the frame rate to the server's tick rate.
So the bottom line is pretty simple. Unless you're a die-hard Star Wars fan (i.e., the kind who has to buy the game just because it's Star Wars); unless you're someone who knows he's going to be playing on a LAN, or on a very fast network to a server known to be using a high tick rate; or unless you're someone who can put up with some seriously jerky game play, you're going to have a bad experience with SW:B. Most gamers will be better off saving their money and waiting to see if the developers fix the problems. I'm enjoying the game, despite all its flaws, but I can only take the ridiculously jerky play for so long. I have to jump in, play a few games, and jump out before I get pissed off. I really want the problems to be fixed, but I'm pretty skeptical that they will be.
So I guess that leaves only one thing to say: help us, Obi Wan, you're our only hope!
10/05/2004