Battlefront: Heroes vs Villains to be reverted; Lando fix hopefully soon

In a post on Battlefront’s official forums, former lead designer Dennis Brannvall alerted players of two tweaks that are inbound for the game.

First up is a change to Heroes vs Villains. This mode was most recently altered with the Rogue One: Scarif update. In that update, the number of round wins required to win a match was changed from five to three.

Brannvall’s reasoning behind the initial change:

As discussed in this forum previously, quite a few were disappointed that the team scramble at map change sometimes kept you playing as the same faction for a long period of time, preventing you from playing as your favorite hero or villain.

In order to fix this problem, we decided to try having each map in HvV play twice, with a faction swap in between. This is exactly how we handle Walker Assault and other asymmetric game modes. What we found then was that this made games go on for a very long time, as average full game rounds of HvV are around 25 minutes, which is way longer than any other of our game modes (which even out at about 15 minutes). This meant that you would be playing a single map of HvV for close to an hour, which felt a bit long. Hence our decision to lower the rounds required to win from 5 to 3, which would lower the total round time to about 15 minutes, meaning you would spend about 30 minutes on each map before moving on. This is similar to Walker Assault.

As this change sparked outcry in the community, DICE has opted to revert the mode back to its original format. This fix shouldn’t require a full client-side patch.

“We have heard your feedback against this change and we will be reverting this decision and changing back Heroes vs Villains to the way it was before the Scarif DLC,” Brannvall wrote. “Luckily, this looks to be a server side change which means this patch can go out much faster than full client patches (exact date to come).”

Additionally, Brannvall commented on the issue plaguing Lando’s Power Blast ability:

As a side note, we have also noticed that a Lando inbalance [sic] slipped through the cracks and we will try our best to get a fix in for this in the same patch.

This second point is perhaps the bigger one for me; Lando’s Power Blast is currently in a form I would consider “game-breaking” as the bug creates such an unfair tilt in Lando’s favor.

As Brannvall noted, no date is set yet for this patch’s arrival. However, as it is server-side and not client-side, hopefully we won’t have to wait too long. Additionally, players shouldn’t need to download anything; instead, the change will occur on EA’s servers.

(Top image source. Second image by Cinematic Captures. Check out their Flickr page for more awesome Battlefront images.)