Star Wars Battlefront II (2017 video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars Battlefront II arrived in 2017, the fourth mainline entry in the Battlefront series and a sequel to DICE's 2015 reboot of the franchise. It promised more content than that predecessor. The singleplayer campaign followed an original character never featured in the films, Iden Versio. Her story unfolds in the years between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. None of that turned out to be what defined the game's launch. A monetization system built into its multiplayer set off an uproar. Lawmakers and gambling regulators on multiple continents took notice. The fallout knocked billions off its publisher's stock value within weeks. How did a Star Wars video game end up compared to an online casino by an elected official? And after such a battering at launch, how did the game spend years fighting to rebuild trust? Nearly a decade later, it found itself surging in popularity again.

• 2. Three Eras of Warfare

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  Fifteen locations greeted players at launch, from Kamino's cloning facilities to Hoth's frozen plains and the wreckage of the Death Star II. Ground battles and space battles run on separate controls, letting a single match mix foot soldiers with starfighter pilots. Three eras of Star Wars history divide the roster. The Clone Wars pits the Galactic Republic against the Confederacy of Independent Systems. The Galactic Civil War sets the Rebel Alliance against the Galactic Empire. A third era covers the Resistance fighting the First Order. Every faction fields its own soldier type, clone troopers, battle droids, or stormtroopers, though the classes control identically no matter which side wears the uniform. Eight further maps arrived after launch, among them Crait, Jabba's Palace, Kessel, Geonosis, Felucia, Ajan Kloss, Scarif, and the space-only map D'Qar.

  Four soldier classes, Assault, Heavy, Officer, and Specialist, are open to every faction from the start, with no battle points required. Leveling up earns a Skill Point. It can unlock or upgrade a Star Card, boosting a class's health regeneration, damage, or abilities. Up to three Star Cards can be equipped at once. Reinforcement classes work differently. Battle points earned from kills and objectives unlock roles like the Enforcer, Aerial, and Infiltrator, along with vehicle-based Speeder and Armor troops. One Reinforcement, the Artillery, is confined to specific Galactic Assault maps, such as the Separatists' MTT, usable only on Naboo and Kashyyyk.

  A hero costs 4,000 battle points to bring onto the battlefield. Unlike in the original Battlefront, heroes form a complete class, one that levels up and unlocks new looks. Galactic Assault allows up to three heroes per side, while Supremacy allows two. Dedicated modes such as Heroes vs. Villains and Hero Showdown drop the hero limit altogether, letting matches run entirely on named characters. That battle-point economy powering heroes had no bearing on a separate mode of play: the singleplayer campaign, which ran by its own rules.

• 3. Iden Versio's War

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  Janina Gavankar voices Iden Versio, commander of the Galactic Empire's Inferno Squad, introduced aboard a Rebel Star Cruiser called the Invincible Faith. Her droid Dio frees her from captivity, and she erases an Imperial transmission before escaping into space, where the squad's flagship, the Corvus, retrieves her. Del Meeko, voiced by T. J. Ramini, and Gideon Hask, voiced by Paul Blackthorne, round out her squad.

  During the Battle of Endor, Inferno Squad watches the Death Star explode overhead. The squad then retreats to the Star Destroyer Eviscerator, commanded by Iden's father, Admiral Garrick Versio. A messenger droid delivers the Emperor's final order: Operation Cinder. The Admiral sends Iden and Hask to an Imperial shipyard at Fondor to protect the Star Destroyer Dauntless and its experimental satellites. Del travels separately to Pillio, where he meets Luke Skywalker. The two fend off local wildlife to reach one of the Emperor's hidden vaults, and Luke keeps one of its treasures for himself.

  Vardos, Iden's home planet, becomes Operation Cinder's next target, its skies torn by storms meant to devastate the population. Iden and Del abandon their orders to save civilians instead, prompting Hask to turn on them. General Lando Calrissian and Princess Leia Organa welcome the pair into the fight against the Empire. After helping liberate Naboo, Iden and Del defect to the New Republic.

  Months later, Inferno Squad's newest member, Shriv Suurgav, joins Iden and Del on a mission to Takodana. There they rescue General Han Solo, who had gone missing while extracting data from an Imperial defector. The recovered data names Admiral Versio's operations on Bespin and Sullust. On Bespin, Hask leads Iden and Del into a trap, though they escape after destroying a Star Destroyer fueling station. On Sullust, Lando and Shriv destroy a hidden Imperial weapons factory. With both operations crippled, the Imperial fleet makes its last stand at Jakku.

  During the battle, Iden shoots down Hask's fighter and boards the Eviscerator to reach her father. Admiral Versio chooses to go down with his ship rather than survive its defeat. He urges Iden to escape and start a new life, telling her she was right to see the Empire's weaknesses. Iden takes an escape pod and reunites with Del and Shriv. She and Del share a kiss as the battle marks the end of the Galactic Empire.

  Three decades later, Gleb captures Del on Pillio and hands him to Kylo Ren and the First Order. Kylo interrogates Del for the location of Luke Skywalker before leaving him to Hask, now a First Order officer. Hask, disgusted that Del chose to start a family instead of staying a soldier, executes him. He then orders Gleb to leave the abandoned Corvus on Pillio as bait, warning that the New Republic must never learn about 'Project Resurrection.'

  Shriv, now working for the Resistance, later finds the abandoned Corvus and brings the news to Iden and her daughter, Zay, voiced by Brittany Volcy. Del, they learn, had been helping the Resistance trace rumors of mass disappearances linked to Project Resurrection. The trail leads to Athulla, then to the ruins of Vardos, where survivors reveal the First Order has been kidnapping children to raise as a new generation of stormtroopers.

  Hask captures Iden and Shriv on Vardos and admits to killing both Gleb and Del. He orders his Star Destroyer, the Retribution, to destroy the Corvus, though Zay escapes by pod. Iden, Shriv, and Zay steal TIE fighters to board the Retribution itself. There they confirm the child-soldier program. They also discover the First Order has secretly rebuilt a fleet large enough to retake the galaxy, along with plans for a new Dreadnought. Iden and Zay destroy the ship's hyperspace generators, pulling it out of hyperspace near Starkiller Base just as the Resistance destroys that weapon. Hask ambushes the pair. Iden shoots him and throws him to his death, but she is fatally wounded herself. She orders Zay to escape with the Dreadnought plans without her. Zay and Shriv deliver those plans to General Leia Organa, who sends them to the Outer Rim to gather allies.

• 4. Three Studios, One Game

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  On the 10th of May 2016, Electronic Arts announced Battlefront II's development, led by DICE. Motive Studios built the singleplayer campaign, while Criterion Games handled starfighter combat and mechanics. EA's chief financial officer, Blake Jorgensen, told an earnings call the game would draw on the sequel trilogy of films. Creative director Bernd Diemer said the team had scrapped the paid Season Pass model used for the 2015 game. He argued it had fragmented that game's community. The new system was meant to let all players keep playing longer.

  Executive producer Matthew Webster confirmed the release date at Star Wars Celebration on the 15th of April 2017: worldwide launch on the 17th of November 2017. A beta opened to pre-order customers on the 4th of October, expanded to everyone on the 6th, and closed on the 11th. Subscribers to EA Access and Origin Access got a ten-hour trial on the 9th of November, a week before the wider release.

  A tie-in novel, Star Wars Battlefront II: Inferno Squad, reached shelves on the 25th of July 2017. Written by Christie Golden, it follows the same squad hunting the remnants of Saw Gerrera's rebel cell after the events of the 2016 film Rogue One. It serves as a direct prelude to the game. Years later, in early 2019, a small LEGO set called the Inferno Squad Battle Pack extended the tie-in further. Iden Versio joined the mobile game Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes as a playable character in January 2022, timed to the game's fifth anniversary.

  That beta window in October would be where the first player complaints about the game's monetization system surfaced, months before any government regulator took notice.

• 5. Pride and Accomplishment

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  During the pre-release beta, players and journalists testing early copies flagged rewards that seemed unrelated to how well someone had actually played. A reward system combined with weak inactivity detection let some players tie rubber bands around their controllers to farm points automatically. That undercut the experience for everyone else in a match.

  On the 12th of November 2017, a Reddit user complained that Darth Vader still required 60,000 credits to unlock, despite having bought the Deluxe Edition. Players estimated the grind at 40 hours. EA's Community Team defended the system, saying it wanted players to feel 'a sense of pride and accomplishment' after earning a hero the hard way. The reply drew hundreds of thousands of negative responses. By December 2025 its score had fallen past negative 660,000, the most downvoted comment in the site's history. It has held a Guinness World Record since 2019.

  EA cut the credit cost of heroes by 75 percent in response, though it also reduced the credits awarded for finishing the campaign. The day before launch, EA disabled microtransactions entirely, citing concerns that they gave paying players an unfair edge. The company said it planned to bring them back later, once changes were made. The company's share price fell 2.5 percent on launch day. Wall Street analysts lowered their expectations for the game's earnings. By the end of November 2017, EA had lost 3 billion dollars in stock value since the game's launch.

  On the 16th of March 2018, DICE announced an overhaul of the entire progression system. Loot crates would afterward contain only credits and cosmetic items, while crystals, the other in-game currency, could only buy cosmetics. Star Card progression became linear, tied to playing a specific class or hero rather than random drops. The first phase landed on the 21st of March, unlocking every hero and vehicle regardless of prior progress.

  The overhaul arrived months after government regulators far from EA's boardrooms had already begun asking whether any of this qualified as gambling.

• 6. Governments Get Involved

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  Two days before release, Belgium's gambling regulator opened an investigation into Battlefront II, alongside Overwatch, over whether its loot boxes amounted to unlicensed gambling. EA argued they did not. The Belgian Gaming Commission eventually ruled that loot boxes did violate gambling law in general. It cleared this particular game because EA had already pulled its microtransactions. Belgium's Minister of Justice, Koen Geens, said that if loot boxes were proven to break gambling law, he would push to ban them EU-wide.

  The Netherlands' Gambling Commission opened its own investigation once Belgium's concluded. Its head urged parents to keep an eye on what games their children were playing. In Hawaii, state representative Chris Lee called the game 'an online casino designed to trap little kids.' He said he intended to push a ban on the practice in his state. A fellow representative compared it to cigarette advertising, saying, 'We didn't allow Joe Camel to encourage your kids to smoke cigarettes, and we shouldn't allow Star Wars to encourage your kids to gamble.'

  Singapore's National Council on Problem Gambling monitored the situation too, noting loot boxes fell outside the country's Remote Gambling Act. Authorities in Australia opened their own inquiry. The Parliament of the United Kingdom investigated the same question. EA told lawmakers its loot boxes were 'quite ethical and fun,' comparing them to Kinder Eggs. Parliament disagreed, concluding that loot boxes did constitute gambling and should be regulated as such.

  None of those rulings stopped critics from weighing in on the very game everyone was suddenly arguing about.

• 7. Verdicts and Numbers

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  Metacritic logged the reviews as 'mixed or average,' though individual critics were often more decisive than that label suggests. Andy Hartup gave the game 4 out of 5 stars for GamesRadar+, praising the multiplayer. He called the campaign 'a lavish, beautiful story campaign lacking in substance or subtlety.' Game Revolution felt the campaign opened strong before losing steam. It also praised the multiplayer while criticizing the microtransactions and hero-locking progression.

  EGM's Nick Plessas praised the combat, balancing, and variety of the multiplayer but criticized its fixation on loot crates. Andrew Reiner at Game Informer scored the game 6.5 out of 10. He wrote that a full campaign and ample multiplayer content were 'brought down by microtransactions.' IGN's Tom Marks landed on the same score, 6.5 out of 10. He wrote that the game's 'great feeling blasters' were undercut by a progression system that made firing them 'an unsatisfying grind.'

  Two years later, IGN sent David Jagneaux back to the game. His score climbed to 8.8 out of 10. He credited two years of updates for turning it into one of the best multiplayer takes on the Star Wars universe. He still called the singleplayer story 'overly safe, short, and disappointing.' IGN had already nominated the game for Best Shooter, Best Graphics, and Best Multiplayer in its Best of 2017 Awards. Giant Bomb named it runner-up for Most Disappointing Game of the year.

  In the United States, Battlefront II was the second best-selling game of November, trailing only Call of Duty: WWII. Its first week in Japan brought 38,769 PlayStation 4 copies sold, good for fourth place on the all-format chart. By December 2017 the game had sold 9 million copies worldwide. In January 2018, EA admitted it had missed its own target of 10 million copies. It pointed to the loot crate controversy as the reason.

  None of those numbers hinted at what the game's community would build once official development slowed down.

• 8. Repairing and Reviving

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  The Last Jedi Season reached players on the 5th of December 2017, ten days ahead of the film's release. It added a Crait map, a D'Qar space map, and two new heroes: Finn for the Resistance and Captain Phasma for the First Order. A continuation of the campaign, Battlefront II: Resurrection, followed on the 13th of December. The Solo: A Star Wars Story season came next, announced by EA Star Wars in May 2018. It brought a new Hero Showdown mode and the returning Jabba's Palace map. A later update added a Kessel map and a Solo-styled Millennium Falcon.

  A Clone Wars season introduced the Capital Supremacy mode on the 26th of March 2019, alongside a Geonosis map. New heroes Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, General Grievous, and Count Dooku joined the roster, voiced by the actors who played them in the animated Clone Wars series. On the 5th of December 2019, a Celebration Edition bundled every cosmetic released so far. It arrived alongside a Rise of Skywalker season that added an Ajan Kloss map and new sequel-trilogy content. Updates based on the original trilogy followed in early 2020, including a Scarif map tied to Rogue One.

  Free content updates stopped on the 29th of April 2020. EA judged that the game had reached its target player count and had improved enough since launch. Years later, on the 19th of December 2024, the complete edition became available at no extra cost on the Xbox Game Pass subscription catalogue. The offer lasted only a limited time.

  Fans kept building on the game long after EA stopped. Modders added heroes never officially included, such as Ahsoka Tano, the Mandalorian, and Cal Kestis. In early 2020, one mod replaced BB-8 with Grogu. After hacking reports surfaced on multiplayer servers in October 2021, DICE patched common exploits in February 2022, with another round of fixes following in January 2026. In December 2025, a community-built server called Kyber launched in open beta for the Windows version. It added a server browser the official game never had. Kyber went open source the following January.

  Then, in May 2025, player counts surged on Windows and Xbox. The game had just arrived on Xbox Game Pass. The Andor television series was airing its final season. Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith had just returned to theaters for its 20th anniversary. Fortnite was running a Star Wars themed season of its own. A community call to play on the 24th of May pushed Steam's concurrent player count to almost 19,000, surpassing the previous peak of 10,000. Former developers and actors from the franchise noticed the resurgence, including actor Muhannad Ben Amor, who played Wilmon Paak in Andor. A sale event the following month, in June 2025, pushed Steam's concurrent count to almost 36,000, breaking the record again within weeks.