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--Obi-Wan Kenobi
Hello, Everyone! Welcome to Skookum Valley Gaming. I just wanted to get out a quick blog and video showing my first impressions of the new Star Wars Battlefront Death Star DLC that was released today to Season Pass members. A full highlights video and blog review will be posted later this week.
I have been loving this game since the first release! The first two DLC packages kept me fully engaged by thoroughly impressing me with the developer's attention to detail. Ever since the announcement of the Death Star DLC, I have been eagerly awaiting it's arrival.
While playing the game, some interesting visual anomalies were experienced. In one form of optical oddity, the respawn splash screen was unrecognizable. This can be seen in the video after the first death (at the 11 second mark). It goes by quickly but you can hear me say, "Yeah, that graphic's messed up."
Other visual side-effects seemed to occur mostly when making the transition between the space-based and ground-based battles while playing the new Battle Station game mode.
This intriguing new game mode is a clever variation on familiar themes which builds upon a mixture of space-based Fighter Squadron and ground based infantry battles. It looks like there may still be some wrinkles to iron out in the code which supports this new feature.
At first, I thought the cut-scene was glitching and was failing to render at the same high-resolution that we have come to enjoy in this rather ground-breaking game. You can see the first example at the 21 second mark where I say, "Man! What has happened here?" The visual anomaly prompted me to reset my PS4 because I thought memory was getting corrupted or something.
After the reset, I quickly returned to the same transition cut-scene and it looked just as bad each time. There is a similar cut-scene during the transition between the second and third phase of Battle Station where the gameplay returns to space based battles above the surface of the Death Star. This cut-scene (staring at 0:56) also has the same, strange, low-resolution (and kind of odd looking) graphical quality as the one between the first and second phases of the game mode.
Other anomalies were encountered during these transitions as I continued to play several rounds. Each time the transitions occurred, slightly different oddities would arise. Some of these included loss of sound (at 1:11) and other screen effects which you can see in the video in the link. Check out the incident where the top 1/3 of the screen goes white while the bottom 2/3 remains black for no apparent reason (at time 1:51).
...and why is the spinning load circle in the center of the screen and not down at the lower right?
My suspicion is that there is a really heavy context switch required between those phases of Battle Station. I'm thinking that swapping out one map for another while running the same game mode is something that was not built into the underlying software design. It probably requires a lot of resources and, being something new, is causing some unexpected and undesirable behavior. EA DICE will likely address this issue in a future patch and it's not a game changer or show stopper by any means.
...and why is the spinning load circle in the center of the screen and not down at the lower right?
My suspicion is that there is a really heavy context switch required between those phases of Battle Station. I'm thinking that swapping out one map for another while running the same game mode is something that was not built into the underlying software design. It probably requires a lot of resources and, being something new, is causing some unexpected and undesirable behavior. EA DICE will likely address this issue in a future patch and it's not a game changer or show stopper by any means.
I chatted with someone online who was also playing the game tonight. This user mentioned seeing the some problems and when I spoke about the anomalies that I was seeing, he said that he'd seen them too and was glad that I mentioned it because he thought maybe it was just him.
In any case, I really do appreciate the work that EA DICE has put into this truly remarkable and beautifully rendered game. However, I do think that something unfortunate has happened and perhaps this DLC was release just slightly prematurely. I'm hoping that there will be a patch coming soon and we can put all of this strangeness behind us.
Bonus Video Link! Another PS4 SWBF player posted a rather entertaining glitch. What happens when you respawn in space but the game forgets to give you a space ship? Click on the video frame to find out!
Stay Skookum!
Pilchuck
of Skookum Valley Gaming
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