This week, Aspyr announced Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, which as its name suggests is a re-release of the beloved Pandemic games from 2004 and 2005. Of course, its return includes certain improvements, such as some content from the Xbox version original – which today is considered the best in everything except resolution – as well as battles for up to 64 players that previously only existed on PC. That all sounds great to the console audience, but from the Steam forums some worries come.
What will happen to the original Pandemic games? These are still marketed through Steam and still have a fairly decent audience for such old titles. Some fear that they will be removed from the store to make room for a version that is theoretically superior, but about which we still don’t know much.
Will community servers be supported? Most likely not, and that is a problem because if so the community will end up fragmented between multiple versions of the same games. Furthermore, we do not know how the connectivity of the compilation works: if it is through dedicated servers, these will end up being turned off eventually; and if it is (P2P) it can cause many unpleasant problems typical of competitive games.
Will the mods survive? NexusMods has some community contributions in the form of unofficial patches, technical fixes, and miscellaneous features that may not be compatible with the Aspyr re-release. The user iamshaymin claims, in fact, that the official images show outdated content of one of his mods; which means that before the game comes out you already need to catch up.
When does Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection come out?
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection will be available on PC through Steam on March 14, this time without EA’s annoying DRM. It will have a price of 34.14 euros; although you can pre-order it with up to a 20% discount (27.32) if you have the originals in your library and get it before its release. It will bring with it full campaigns and multiplayer, including elements that were previously only on consoles: there will be more heroes, maps and even functions such as split screen.
