Event: Mweb Star Wars Battlefront Launch

Published November 27, 2015

Last weekend myself and the irrepressible Uberutang were lucky enough to attend Mweb’s launch event for the launch of EA’s *insert your own adjective here* Star Wars Battlefront. The following article will list both my experiences and thoughts regarding the event, and then my experiences and thoughts regarding the game itself. Hint: They’re polar opposites….

The Event:

Mweb are certainly looking to make a name for themselves in the realms of game hosting. Nowhere does that show more than at the M-Cave, a section at their head office set aside specifically for us geeky gamer types to come and ogle the latest games and hardware that we can get our grubby little mitts on. It really is fantastic to see growth in this aspect of the SA Gaming industry. For too long we’ve seen the lavish launch events enjoyed by those filthy foreign types in Englelands and Americo. Now we get our own, and I applaud it wholeheartedly.

Along with the standard things you would expect to see at a game launch (IE: a host of PC/s consoles with playable release copies running on them) there were a range of other Star Wars related activities to partake of. Some of the highlights included

a 3D printer churning our tiny little Yoda figurines,

a StormTrooper shooting gallery where you could blast away with a Nerf gun and win yourself some extra goodies (in true StormTrooper fashion I missed 90% of the targets…),

people gyrating to the dancing section of Star Wars Kinect,

Awesome cosplayers representing some of the most iconic characters and races of the Star Wars univere,

1 cubic buttload of geeky toys and collectibles

Mini Yoda’s being 3D printed during the event

Completed Yoda figures

An Ewok, a Twi’lek and someone cosplaying as PikeyZA (?!)

Luke Skywalker himself!

Assassin’s Creed figurines

On top of that there were some awesome displays for various gaming hardware and peripherals, which I may have spent a fair amount of time drooling over… especially the Gigabyte graphics cards and motherboards. I may have been tempted to grab a 980Ti and run for it, but unfortunately Darth Vader was lurking nearby as security. 🙁

Star Wars Battlefront:

Obviously the main reason for the launch was to showcase the game itself, and there were a number of PC’s and XBox One’s running the game in different game modes for us to have a play on. I personally got to try the “Supremacy” online game mode, which is essentially your standard Conquest game mode from the Battlefield series. In this game mode you capture and hold various objectives around the map, while simultaneously preventing your opponent from doing the same. I also had a go on the XBox One version of the game’s Horde mode, the usual ‘defeat waves of increasing difficulty’ mode.

Graphically I’m very impressed with Battlefront, the Frostbite engine is very impressive in this regard and you can see that a lot of effort has been put into making the landscape and player models look as accurate as possible. However, I have to report that sadly the over riding feeling I got from the game itself was one of intense boredom. Half way through the round I was literally looking for someone to take over for me. Despite the impressive graphics the game just feels like a generic FPS, and a slow one at that. On top of that the weapons lack any real distinction between them, and unlocking a new one left me thinking “Oh, okay then. Yay?” So despite my new ability to pew pew slightly faster, I happily let someone take over from me and went and found something more interesting to do.

For a more in depth look at the game from someone who isn’t a crotchety old grump watch out for our upcoming full review of Star Wars Battlefront.

Overall the event itself was fantastic, there was a lot of fun to be had from the listed activities to tweet races to win extra goodies. We all got to have a hands on session with the release version of Battlefront, and we all got a goody bag with some funky toys in. Wheee! 🙂

Thanks to Mweb for hosting the event, despite my being less than impressed with Star Wars Battlefront, they put on a great event and I hope to see many more happening at the M-Cave in the future.

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PikeyZA

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