by Doc – Owner, Founder, This Makes Four Consoles I’ve Owned This Game On (PS2, PC Steam, Switch 1 and Switch 2)
There is an actual 2v2 Hero meta out there, this post isn’t about that. But it’s cool, and you should look it up.
I’ve written more than a healthy man should about Star Wars: Battlefront II, the Pandemic Studios one (not the reboot, we don’t talk about the reboot). It’s a real contender for the game that I’ve spent the most hours in my life playing, and would have to compete with Team Fortress 2, the Smash Bros series and Pokemon Go. Safe to say I know the game inside and out. I’m talking specifically about the Aspyr port from 2023, called the Battlefront Classic Collection, which doesn’t have cross-brand console compatibility, so know that everything I’m about to say here was taken from the only live lobby on a random Thursday evening (about an hour ago, actually) and is exclusive to Switch 1 and Switch 2 players. I’m sure that the epic hardcore mega gamers over in PC Land will have had more people and possibly better connections.
Anyway, the “meta” of the Instant Action gamemode is pretty different than how a high-level player would play offline against the bots. As I said in that linked post, when you’re not playing with lag the best class is basically always the sniper class: one shot, one kill on most everyone and it neuters even the heroes at any range. It’s so broken it’s not even funny. Lower than that is the Infantry, which has the Elite Rifle when bonuses are unlocked and that’s so broken it’s not funny either.
Having competent human players (there were about 5-7 in my lobby) and extreme lag changes all that. The lag has more of an effect than the humans; because most of the shots you took would just miss on the server side due to your perceived placements not lining up with the server’s tracking, there’s no point in using projectile weapons hardly at all. Seriously. If you’re shooting, you’re losing in most cases. It’s bad enough that physically moving your unit around is more accurate than using a Joy-Con stick (not the most suited for precision), and because units are all the same height you can still hope for a headshot. Most of the time when you get one it won’t count, but hey, it’s nice when it does.
So what do you use if you can’t shoot? Well, on Utapau, we struggled through it as best we could. Most players seemed to try sniping, with their primary targets being the CPU units instead of each other like you’d expect. Large maps mean that you have to focus on the numbers game.
Small maps are a different story. We spent some time on Polis Massa and Tantive IV, where all the human players were using the Assault units for their bazookas, mines and thermal detonators. See, because shooting isn’t really an option anymore, explosive placement became the best way to play. The lag was so bad that players would often have their mines blow up in their face from an enemy stepping on them and come away unharmed! I’d estimate it was about a 300 ping on everyone’s end (no, it wasn’t just me, I have very good internet for online gaming and my Switch 2 is set up for that). I got a kick out of it. The game was so unreliable the only way you could guarantee getting a kill is if the server did the killing for you by figuring that yeah, there was a mine there, so they died. Nothing else would have worked.
Heroes seemed extremely ineffective compared to their normal OP status, too. There was usually about a one-second delay between when I’d get a kill and when they’d actually die a lot of the times, and in some cases (not shown in the gif) they didn’t die at all after I’d hit them. Typically heroes will instakill normal enemies with one swing of the lightsaber or two if they’re a heavy, but here it took some tries.
After only about five games to get used to the controls, I feel like I did pretty well. First time playing on a controller (aside from maybe two sessions with it when it first came out for Switch 1) since 2012!
Amiibo Doctor 