Star Wars Battlefront 2 allows players to live out their most epic Star Wars fantasies by participating in grand, large-scale battles and directly controlling many of the series’ iconic heroes and villains. One of the game’s playable villains is the conniving Emperor Palpatine (also known as Darth Sideous to the more dedicated Star Wars fans out there), who, in Battlefront 2, is a surprisingly agile combatant that can leap around the battlefield and shock his foes with lightning.
However, Battlefront 2’s most recent game update, which was deployed on June 28, brought back an infamous Palpatine glitch from the game’s early days, prompting developer DICE to remove him from the game’s roster entirely while it devises a fix.
Earlier this year, a previous game update unintentionally introduced a bug which allowed Palpatine’s ranged lightning attacks to target and hit opposing players through walls. This naturally led to a major upswing in Palpatine’s popularity as skilled/clever/devious/all of the above players were essentially able to “farm” kills as Palpatine with virtual impunity. Palpatine was quickly nerfed to remove his unintentionally god-like lightning strikes, and so he remained…until the June 28 hotfix.
The June 28 update was meant to help buff Palpatine’s close-quarters capabilities (an area in which he was found to be underperforming when compared to other playable hero/villain characters). However, after downloading and applying the update, fans were disheartened to discover that the lightning wall-clipping bug had resurfaced, leading to a flood of negative threads on the Battlefront 2 subreddit like this one.
In response to the fan backlash, DICE announced on July 5 that it would be temporarily removing Palpatine from the game until a hotfix for the wall-clipping bug could be deployed. Many fans were pleased by the decision to remove Palpatine, but others shared their frustrations over DICE’s inability to properly address the bug the first time around, and that each new Battlefront 2 update seems to break just as many things as it fixes. As of this writing, there’s no clear timeline for when Palpatine will be reinstated, though at least players need no longer worry about being unfairly killed by the Emperor’s lightning.
In happier Star Wars gaming news, Titanfall developer Respawn recently announced during E3 that its upcoming Star Wars title is called Star Wars: Fallen Jedi Order. As for more generalized sci-fi gaming news, Destiny 2 developer Bungie has also announced that the game’s upcoming Forsaken expansion will adjust the weekly refresh rate for certain milestone activities.