While Need for Speed Payback hasn't really managed to convince the press, another big EA game is about to be released. Star Wars Battlefront II has been available on EA Access (Xbox and PC) since yesterday and we have captured some Xbox One X footage of the single player campaign. Only 3 chapters are proposed at the moment, and so far it's mediocre at best. Image quality is great, with detailed textures and clean graphics overall, but when it comes to gameplay, it is a very generic title whose story doesn't seem particularly appealing. We truly hope the rest of the campaign can prove us wrong, but for the moment, there is no reason to be interested in Battlefront II if multiplayer isn't your thing. Not a surprise some will say, but optimistic as we are, we believe that making bad single player mode should not become usual for a big company like EA.
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Getting back to Star Wars: Battlefront 2, the biggest problem with it is still the loot boxes based progression system. Which is still "Pay to Win" at launch. Best to read the whole article which is short than just a quote, but for those who prefer TL:DR.
EuroGamer - The price and state of Star Wars Battlefront 2 loot crates at launch - Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
"As you can see, EA might have removed the top tier of Star Card from loot crates but you are still at an obvious advantage decked out in blues or even greens - or simply by having more cards in your collection."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-09-the-p...
Need for Speed: Payback also has a similar problem, where the progression through the game by levelling up your cars, unlocking performance upgrades and customization items has been slow down to insure that the player spends a really huge amount of time grinding or straight out buy them with a system more reminiscent of "Free-to-Play" mobile games.
EuroGamer - Need for Speed Payback review - Sin city.
"There's an element of levelling up your car, though progression is slow and matched to an unsatisfying card collection game that makes little sense. You could always speed things up by buying a loot box, of course, which may well contain in-game currency."
"Its open world is a little too vast, its events too thinly spread and the sense of progression is slow enough to make it all feel like an absolute slog. There's vehicle customisation here - enabled, performance-wise, by a card system that's been sloppily and unwisely appropriated from the world of mobile, while cosmetic enhancements are now locked until you've managed a number of in-game achievements - but it takes an age to achieve anything, and well over half a dozen hours until your garage begins to flourish. Latter events require a soulless grind, and given the presence of loot boxes and microtransactions it's easy to be cynical of why exactly your progress feels wilfully stunted."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-08-need-...
Edit: Star Wars: Battlefront II was co-developed by 3 studios: EA DICE, Criterion Games and Motive Studios. I found out which studio was responsible for the single-player campaign, it was "Motive Studios, who are developing the single player mode".
Wookieepedia - Star Wars Wikia - Star Wars Battlefront II:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Battlefro...
Still, DICE doesn't have a good track record with single-player campaigns. Their best and very good ones were the ones in the 2 Bad Company games, which were exciting, funny and had some serious moments as well. But it seems they weren't responsible for the single-player campaign in Star Wars: Battlefront II.
The issue with this game is the microtransaction BS surrounding it. The fact review copies apparently required less to unlock heroes than the retail version. And How it apparently takes 40 hours of grinding to unlock vader and luke...unless you cough up some extra cash of course...EA can go to hell tbh.