I've been playing SWBF2 since 2005, and developing and shipping mods for it since 2010. I cannot faithfully recommend this collection at this time. (Play time says 0.2 hours but I was watching footage all day yesterday as well.) A lot of this is notes gathered by the modding community that I agree with.
- Vertex colors seem to have been completely removed from all of the environment art, which completely removes all the baked lighting from the interior maps, and the end result looks terrible.
- The console version of the instant action screen is and has always been terrible. Adding missions is slow and cumbersome and a massive pain. I get why they did it (for controller users), but it really sucks for KBM. Same with the spawn screen for KBM, as iconic as it may have been for the console versions. I understand now why Pandemic used a different spawn screen for PC.
- Frame rate is capped to 30fps in multiplayer matches.
- Starfighter controls appear to be inverted for some reason by default? Not sure if this is still relevant.
- Water across the board looks worse. It seems they've removed the specular layer from it but I'm not sure.
- Almost all the environment art has a weird, strong specular shine to it, and in most cases it looks really bad. Doesn't help that it's shaded per-vertex instead of per-pixel.
- Font is ugly af what on earth
- Loadscreens look terrible, including the atrocious tooltip box UI texture which is blown way up for some reason. Plus, the black bars have been removed from the top and bottom, which makes the other text really hard to read in some cases.
- All the maps are just brighter overall with unexplained blooming surfaces.
- Weird debug(?) cubes at the bottom of every doorway.
- Weapon scope textures are cut off on the left and right side of the screen, which looks horrible. I don't even know how that one went unnoticed.
- Medals don't show in the endgame screen.
- Loads of random overlapping text in various Uls across the game.
There's many more issues but it's honestly too much to list. If all you care about is "better" multiplayer and splitscreen, then go for it I guess. Otherwise, stick to the original releases of this game.
Once again, it appears that the modding community will have to clean up after yet another butchering of these games. It's really unfortunate. Hopefully at least some of this will be addressed in a future patch or two, but I wouldn't count on it.
izigame.me
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