Battlefront was well-received in the extensive beta, and EA clearly has confidence in it to grant players the ability to play the entire thing in EA Access. I don’t know why this is all happening with Battlefront either, the same way I didn’t understand the Fallout 4 situation. Restricting an official review when the game has effectively been out for four or five days is just ludicrous, and is only going to create splintered, strange review coverage of the game. Whoever attended the review event should be able to post their impressions of the game as soon as EA Access launched early availability for the game. And then there will be late ones, which will come from those who are either spreading out their EA Access time, or didn’t agree to the review event rules and will now review the game with a retail copy on their own time. There will be “official” ones from the review event attendees that launch exactly on release day. There will be early ones, either impressions pieces or full-on scored review that run before the game comes out. So now we have a few classes of review that will be coming out. And yet they will be writing “official” scored reviews based on that experience. I suppose it’s possible maybe people are locked in a room sinking 40 hours into the game at the event, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was significantly less than that. You may say that ten hours with the game is not enough to craft a scored review, and you could be right, but certainly a number of sites won’t see it that way.Īnd are they wrong? At a review event, I would be amazed if each individual attendee got all that much more than 10 total hours to play the game. Sites can essentially review Battlefront whenever they want now, if they have EA Access. What this is going to do is make review coverage really messed up for Battlefront, because this is what’s going to happen.
Forbes did not attend this event, and I know a few other major sites didn’t show up either due to these conditions.