Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection Will Be Pointless Without One Feature
The Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection will bring back popular multiplayer modes, and one feature could make these online battles even better.
Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection is coming to modern devices with restored maps and characters for its 20th anniversary.
This collection includes popular single-player and multiplayer modes, with up to 64 players able to join online battles.
Cross-gen multiplayer has been confirmed for PlayStation and Xbox but no word on cross-platform play yet, despite the trend in modern gaming.
The Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection has been announced, bringing both of Pandemic Studios’ 2000s-era Star Wars: Battlefront games to modern devices to celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary, complete with restored maps and characters that will be debuting on some platforms for the first time. The collection has been restored by Aspyr, the studio behind many previous Star Wars remasters and ports such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, as well as the recent Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered collection and will be a multi-platform release, coming to Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.
This will be the first time the Star Wars: Battlefront games will be on a Nintendo platform, as they skipped the Nintendo GameCube upon their initial release in 2004 and 2005, launching only on PC, PlayStation 2, and the original Xbox .
The Star Wars: Battlefront games’ campaigns covered key moments from across the original and prequel Star Wars trilogies, with Star Wars: Battlefront 2 focusing on the rise of Darth Vader, and there were several popular single-player modes such as the PC-only XL mode, which allowed players to engage in epic battles with AI factions. These were also accompanied by some extremely popular multiplayer modes such as Conquest, Capture the Flag, Hunt, and Assault, which will all be returning for the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection with up to 64 players able to join the battle online.
Cross-gen multiplayer is supported on the PlayStation and Xbox releases of Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, with the new bundle being released on both the current-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles, and the previous PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation on March 14, 2024. No mention has been made about whether the re-release will support cross-platform multiplayer, however, despite the collection’s multi-platform release covering all modern consoles and PC.
This is surprising considering how popular the classic Star Wars: Battlefront games were, and how common cross-platform has become in recent years. Major titles such as Call of Duty and Fortnite have pushed crossplay into the limelight, and now most major AAA multiplayer games release with at least partial cross-platform support.
With the announcements for Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection highlighting the significance of the 64-player multiplayer’s return – with this being lost on consoles over time and only kept going on PC versions of the game – it would make sense for these games to have such a feature to assemble such epic battles across as large a player base as possible. Hopefully, Aspyr will make an announcement regarding this functionality soon, and if the games don’t launch with such a feature, the studio might consider implementing it in a later patch if the Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection’s launch is a success and there is enough demand.