Despite having one of the worst launches in gaming history, Star Wars Battlefront 2 has come a long way since, turning the microtransactions and loot box controversies into a distant memory. With regular free updates, including fan-favorite characters, the game has grown popular with the Star Wars community - as evidenced by the 19 million people who scrambled to pick up the title from the Epic Games Store while it was free.
Recently Epic Games Store offered players the chance to download Star Wars Battlefront 2: Celebration Edition as part of its weekly giveaway scheme. It turns out quite a few people took the offer up, as EA has revealed in a tweet from the EA Star Wars Twitter account that a whopping 19 million people downloaded the game over the course of the weekend. This led to widespread server crashes as the game couldn't handle the massive influx of players.
The support for Star Wars Battlefront 2 is especially amazing when you consider that the developers have no more plans for any future content drops, having finished working on the game in April last year after the Battle of Scarif update. It helps that the game was free and easily accessible, but to amass such a huge number of downloads three years after its launch is highly impressive.
It kind of makes you wonder why DICE isn't creating any more paid content when it seems like Star Wars Battlefront 2 is likely the most popular it's ever been. You've only to look at the comments to EA's announcement to see that there is clear demand from fans for more content, and it's unusual for a publisher to ignore such popularity unless they have something bigger in the works.
It's recently been discovered that the actors behind Iden Versio, Admiral Versio, and Del Meeko are all back in motion capture, adding to the rumors that Battlefront 3 could possibly be in development. However, the studio could also have shifted development to either a new Battlefield game on next-gen consoles or the rumored Battlefield 3 remaster. Only time will tell what EA and DICE are currently working on, but there's an awful lot of people hoping it's Star Wars related.