Aspyr has denied that the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection contains “code or content” from sources the studio has not named. In other words, Aspyr says no, we didn't steal mods for our game from anyone.
The statement was made to IGN, and became necessary after eagle-eyed Star Wars fans took a close look at the trailer for the new package of classic Battlefront games, announced during a Nintendo Direct last week. They noticed a strange Discrepancy: Asajj Ventress – originally an Xbox-only DLC character in 2005 – appeared to be wielding two lightsabers rather than her usual light nunchaku, which always struck me as far too dangerous to ever be of any serious use.
Anyway, that was strange because in this Xbox DLC is Asajj does Have their usual nunchucks. Where she doesn't have it, however, is inside a mod by the author iamashaymin (iamastupid on ModDB), which attempted to bring this exclusive DLC to the PC version by reskinning Aayla Secura. The mod was mostly seamless, aside from the fact that the resulting Asajj only had Aayla's animations and, you guessed it, two lightsabers. No nunchucks in sight.
It didn't take long for a Reddit user to mention his name TMT MrExcitement expressed their suspicion: “It looks like Aspyr ripped an outdated mod from ModDB, where a modder tried to recreate the DLC for the PC version of Battlefront 2 Classic.” What was even more surprising was that it looked like that , as if the version of the mod in this trailer wasn't even current. Newer versions Do have these Asajj-specific animations. Iamashaymin made one too Thread in the Steam forum I'm trying to bring this to Aspyr's attention.
But don't drag Aspyr just yet, because the studio said in this statement to IGN: “When including placeholder material for our announcement last fall, we mistakenly included content that was not included in the product, and this error has it.” “made it to the final cut.” Aspyr confirms that “the upcoming release of Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection does not contain any code or content derived from uncredited sources.”
Reading between the lines a little, it sounds like Aspyr knew it was going to include the Xbox DLC in its upcoming release, but either didn't get its hands on it or didn't get it into a working state in time I wanted to film a trailer for the game, so I relied on a mod to get the point across. When the game actually comes out, the Asajj you find will be the official Pandemic game. At least Aspyr better hope it will be if it doesn't want any more criticism from modders.
Aspyr has been in a tough spot lately. On the one hand, it was apparently dropped from the widely acclaimed KOTOR 1 remake after, well, whatever disaster befell that project. On the other hand, it angers legions of Switch fans by failing to deliver on its promise to include it KOTOR 2's restored content mod on the version of the game of this platform. In other words, it's a company that desperately needs a win, and even relatively minor controversies like this don't help.
