Summary
- Star Wars Battlefront 2 has seen a huge resurgence in players.
- The game is still plagued by hackers, especially on Galactic Assault maps.
- It seems unlikely EA and DICE will address the issue.
Star Wars Battlefront 2’s sudden resurgence is a delightful surprise to fans of the series. Battlefront 2 went from hovering at around 1,500 concurrent players on Steam to having an average of over 17,000, while achieving a new peak player count (18,635) on the platform, eight years after the game’s initial release.
This comeback has been accompanied by calls for Electronic Arts to finish the trilogy, including from Andor actor Muhanned Ben Amor, who plays Wilmon in the show. Former DICE developers have also added their voices to the chorus, saying they’re willing to “get the gang back together” for another instalment.
New Players, Same Problems
However, a resurgence in players has also led to a resurgence in cheaters, an issue that’s plagued Battlefront 2 for years. A user on Reddit named Kamikazee786 posted evidence of a player hacking, captioned with “Hackers on PC are ruining this game again, just as it started to get popular again.”
The video shows the poster in a game of Galactic Assault, except a hacker has taken away their ability to play. This particular mode has an exploit that allows hackers to place players in a “benchmark” mode, essentially forcing their camera to slowly float around the map for the duration of the game.
It’s a completely pointless hack, as the hacker isn’t even achieving a weird power fantasy, like the Han Solo players with infinite detonation charges. Instead, they’re just ruining someone else’s experience for the sake of it, truly bottom-of-the-barrel behaviour.
As tends to be the case, this is a PC-exclusive problem, as consoles can’t run the third-party software required to cheat. According to commenters, a lot of these hacks only work on Galactic Assault, meaning other modes like Supremacy are “safer.”
It seems unlikely that DICE and EA will allocate resources to addressing cheating problems when they failed to do so when the game initially released, but we can always hope.
The pair of companies are currently working on the unannounced Battlefield 6, which is expected to release later this year or early next year.
