Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection incorporated a modder's work after Aspyr promised it would not: 'This release has been a total mess'

Aayla Secura faces down a big alien bug in Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection

(Image credit: Aspyr)

Balance has been restored to the Force. The well-liked Star Wars Dark Forces Remaster was followed by a Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection that's not quite so well-liked. Among the early complaints was the fact the trailer showed a mod had been incorporated without the permission of the modder. Aspyr, the studio behind this remaster, swore the actual release version wouldn't use anyone else's "code or content" without permission. And, while it's since been patched out, that didn't turn out to be true. On both PC and PlayStation, the launch version did indeed incorporate a mod that restored Asajj Ventress as a playable character.

Ventress was exclusive to the Xbox version of Battlefront 2 back in 2005, but modder iamashaymin reskinned Aayla Secura to sneak her into the PC Version. That's why you can tell the footage captured in the Battlefront Classic Collection depicts iamashaymin's mod: Ventress is using Secura's animations and lightsabers. (Funnily enough, later versions of the mod do have Ventress's animations, so Aspyr hadn't even been using an up-to-date version of it.)

IGN contacted iamashaymin, who wasn't impressed. "This release has been a total mess. The fact they had to release patches both before and immediately after releasing two decade old games really says it all," the modder said.

"There's loads of these weird issues that are just screaming rushed development," they went on. "Some textures in the game are even muddled with those from Battlefront 1, like Kashyyyk's water is blue like in Battlefront 1 and not gray like in Battlefront 2 and the DLC maps themselves use completely the wrong textures in a lot of places," iamashaymin said.

The Battlefront modding community had been standing ready, eager to get to grips with the re-release. They're not feeling quite so positive about it now, iamashaymin said. "We were hoping for improvements we could take advantage of to make better and of course would be ready to port and redevelop our modded content to work with the new games. A lot of players in general were hoping for general bug fixes anyway, such as a very famous issue where on Death Star, one of the team's reinforcements ticket count would deplete at twice the rate and voicelines that wouldn't ever play due to a simple typo."

They called this remaster "a very broken game, with a lot of issues we have fixed in the past" and described its disappointing release as "a terrible gut punch."

Meanwhile, what's happening with the remake of Knights of the Old Republic is anyone's guess, though Aspyr was removed from the project and it's rumored to have been delayed for another year. No rush, guys. Maybe take your time with this one.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.