Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection used modder's work without credit
"It's a terrible gut punch."
A modder who believes their uncredited work was included in Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection says the whole experience has been a "gut-punch".
Although developer Aspyr had insisted that the Collection "does not include any code or content that is taken from uncredited sources", modder iamashaymin found their mod had not only been included in the Collection's debut trailer – something Aspyr said was done "mistakenly" – but also in the final game, too.
"This release has been a total mess. The fact they had to release patches both before and immediately after releasing two-decade old games really says it all," iamashaymin told IGN. "Especially considering part of the patches is rumoured to have removed content they had already said was removed months ago.
"There's not really anything else I can say that other players aren't already screaming, it's a terrible feeling getting very pumped for a game like this and it just missing the mark entirely. It's a terrible gut punch."
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection continues to fight growing dissatisfaction from players complaining of bugs and a poor online multiplayer.
Consequently, the modding community was "ready the moment [Aspyr] announced the game", not least because modders "noticed a lot of visual problems as well, decompiling the files has only shown us even worse horrors".
"We were hoping for improvements we could take advantage of to make better and, of course, would be ready to port and redevelop our modded content to work with the new games. A lot of players in general were hoping for general bug fixes anyway, such as a very famous issue where on Death Star, one of the team's reinforcements ticket count would deplete at twice the rate and voicelines that wouldn't ever play due to a simple typo," iamashaymin explained.
"What we found on release was a very broken game, with a lot of issues we have fixed in the past. As well as any mod support for both games being quite badly damaged although just barely functional for Battlefront 2. (All mods for Battlefront 1 are broken now).
"There's loads of these weird issues that are just screaming rushed development," Iamashaymin added. "Some textures in the game are even muddled with those from Battlefront 1, like Kashyyyk's water is blue-like in Battlefront 1 and not gray-like in Battlefront 2 and the DLC maps themselves use completely the wrong textures in a lot of places," Iamashaymin explained.
"These are all things we can fix or just wouldn't have broken to start with. Every few hours there's something new we need to look into and add to a list of planned fixes. And this is not even beginning to touch content and features from other released versions of these games from 20 years ago not present, like four-screen splitscreen."
Aspyr has yet to respond to requests for comment.
The bundle – which launched on 14th March for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox – contains both the original Star Wars: Battlefront and its sequel, Star Wars: Battlefront 2, from 2004 and 2005 respectively, as well as bonus content released for each.
Aspyr has since provided an update on Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, blaming online issues on "critical errors".
"At launch, we experienced critical errors with our network infrastructure," Aspyr stated on its website. This resulted in "incredibly high ping, matchmaking errors, crashes, and servers not appearing in the browser".
The developer said it is now working to "increase network stability", and encouraged players to continue to report bugs, errors, or "unexpected behaviours" in the game through its support site.