Dennis Brännvall, the game’s design director for Star Wars Battlefront II, revealed how DICE managed to regain the players’ trust after the catastrophic 2017 launch.

„Not a week goes by without us thinking, ‘Imagine if we hadn’t launched with loot boxes the way we did.’ We would have been a different place, that’s for sure because we truly believe the game is a worthy sequel to Battlefront 1 and lives up to the legacy of the Battlefront franchise. We needed to take a step back and do some house cleaning — not completely dissimilar to Rainbow Six Siege – they didn’t launch the way they wanted, but now it’s doing well and I think we’re on a similar trajectory. We hit rock bottom in terms of player sentiment but now it’s climbing every month. We’re delivering more content this year than we did in the first year, which is also a sign of a healthy game. The community’s happier than it’s ever been, especially with the big announcement yesterday. I think we had to take a step back, the team had to look at itself in the mirror a little bit, pick ourselves up from a rough Christmas for everyone and then just get back to work. Now it’s a lot of fun. It wasn’t that much fun in the spring of 2018. That wasn’t the best time at DICE, that’s for sure.

Battlefront 1 felt like we were in the sequelised transition phase, in that we knew the end date of Battlefront content before we launched it. We knew it was going to be one year of DLC in a season pass, and then on to Star Wars Battlefront II. And we treated it that way like there was a bookend to the experience. So if there were systems in the first game that might not be working, we could prioritise fixing it for the sequel. With this one, we challenge ourselves to undertake big overhauls of systems that aren’t doing as well as we hoped because this is it, this is the game we’re going to be working on. That’s when it feels like more incremental — there are client patches every month, new features added, whereas in Battlefront 1 we were patching it every quarter with a big DLC and it was mostly for paid users anyway. Yes, there were some bug fixes, but it was mostly for paid users. Now it’s always for everyone. The team enjoys working on it a lot more because you feel like you’re building up a community. It feels a lot more personal, and it’s just a better game. It’s more about improving the game rather than always providing value to the customer, which I think is the approach with a season pass.

There are too many genres of Star Wars games you could make for a big audience of Star Wars fans. We’re entertaining one, and it’s really good to not be the only Star Wars game in town because of the expectations of entertaining everyone. DICE has been on the sequel treadmill for quite a while, and I think the industry is changing rapidly. We felt that, and we know that we want to build communities rather than customers. That’s been a change in our approach. We want to stick with our games a lot longer, and we want our communities to feel like they’re well taken care of. It makes no sense to constantly try to stop them playing the game they like and make them play the new game they also should like just because we don’t want to work on the old game any more. It’s not good for the community, and in this age, if it’s not good for the community it’s probably not going to be good for business either. That’s why we’re sticking with it.

Even back when we took on the franchise, there were questions around whether we should call the first one Battlefront 3. I’m not necessarily sure that whatever the fan expectations of Battlefront 3 are need to happen with a 3 at the end. I think you can get all the Battlefront fantasies that you want from our games. That’s our mindset, trying to give you everything — Instant Action is a good example of that. It’s a throwback name to the franchise when it wasn’t at EA, and people love that. That’s been the key to going forward: respect the past. I’m not sure if we did a good job of that early on, but I think we do a much better job now,” Brännvall told Gamesindustry.

We are not in a position to decide if they are right or not, but DICE indeed stuck by the game, and the number three is unlucky in this series, too. (A few more examples: Half-Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead…)

Source: Gamesindustry