Like Titanfall 2 and Mass Effect: Andromeda before it, EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront 2 may not have a DLC Season Pass. Creative director Bernd Diemer told Mashable outright, “We don’t have a season pass,” before going on to tease that EA is working on “something different” in this area instead.
“I cannot talk about the specifics of this, but we have something different in mind that will allow you to play longer, be [more] invested in the game without having a fragmented community,” he said.
The fragmentation that Diemer is talking about relates to 2015’s Battlefront and the DLC that was released through its own Season Pass. If you don’t own the game’s extra content, it means you aren’t able to play with the game’s full community of players, which in turn can make it more challenging to find a match.
It sounds like Battlefront 2 is taking steps to avoid a similar situation. He told Mashable that it’s “dangerous” for the health of a game’s playerbase when maps and modes are only available to those who pay money for them. In this situation, “The community is falling apart because there are simply not many people playing the different modes.”
He added: “So we definitely want to avoid that. We don’t want to segment our community.”
“We decided on that, and it’s one of those difficult decisions because it has so many implications all around,” Diemer explained. “When we looked at the way Battlefront had evolved over its lifetime, with the DLC and everything, we decided, ‘You know what? For this type of game, season passes are not the best thing. We need to [take it apart] and come up with something better.”
For its part, EA said in a statement to Mashable that it is aware of the feedback from Battlefront as it relates to “live service plans,” and it will announce plans for Battlefront 2 in due time.
“While we’re not ready to confirm any live service plans just yet, what we can say is this we heard the feedback from our Battlefront community loud and clear,” the statement said. “We know they want more depth, more progression, and more content. So we’re focused on delivering that in every dimension of Star Wars Battlefront 2. We’ll have more to share about our plans soon.”
You can read the full story here at Mashable.
For more on Battlefront 2, which launches in November, check out GameSpot’s roundup of everything we know so far.