Star Wars Battlefront 2 PS4 PlayStation 4 1

With games like Overwatch keeping their communities engaged through free content updates and paid cosmetics, the Season Pass is starting to sound old hat these days. And another big budget blockbuster has ditched the divisive DLC model, with Star Wars Battlefront 2 deciding to do away with the paid content pre-order in favour of something that doesn't segment its community.

It's unclear exactly which direction the developer will go, but common sense suggests it'll be looking to Blizzard for inspiration. "When we looked at the way Battlefront had evolved over its lifetime, with the DLC and everything, we decided, 'You know what? For this type of game, Season Passes are not the best thing,'" creative director Bernd Diemer told Mashable. "We need to [take it apart] and come up with something better."

He continued: "I cannot talk about the specifics of this, but we have something different in mind that will allow you to play longer [and] be [more] invested in the game without having a fragmented community."

The original Battlefront decided to break out its many map packs as premium content, which particularly stung given how light the package was at launch. The bigger issue here, however, was that it split the player pool significantly, with a portion of the playerbase never gaining access to the title's newer maps and content.

This model just doesn't make sense for competitive games anymore, particularly when maintaining communities is key. While we appreciate that online games need a steady income in order to expand over time, we much prefer the optional cosmetics model, because at least it keeps communities together, rather than splitting them up.

[source mashable.com]