Aspyr has denied that its upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection contains any “code or content” taken from sources the studio hasn’t credited. In other words, Aspyr says no, we didn’t steal anyone’s mods for our game.
The statement was issued to IGN, and was made necessary after sharp-eyed Star Wars fans took a fine comb to the trailer for the new bundle of classic Battlefront games that was announced as part of a Nintendo Direct last week. They noticed a strange discrepancy: Asajj Ventress—originally an Xbox-only DLC character way back in 2005—seemed to be wielding two lightsabers, rather than her usual light-nunchaku that always struck me as much too dangerous to ever be of any serious use.
Anyway, that was strange because, in that Xbox DLC, Asajj does have her usual nunchucks. Where she doesn’t have them, though, is in a mod by author iamashaymin (iamastupid on ModDB) that attempted to bring that exclusive DLC into the PC version by reskinning Aayla Secura. The mod was mostly seamless, save that the resulting Asajj only had Aayla’s animations and, you guessed it, dual lightsabers. No nunchucks in sight.
It wasn’t long before a Reddit user named TMT-MrExcitement voiced their suspicions: “It looks like Aspyr ripped an outdated mod off of ModDB, where a modder attempted to recreate the DLC, on the PC version for Battlefront 2 Classic.” Even more surprising, it looked like the version of the mod in that trailer wasn’t even up-to-date. More recent versions do have those Asajj-specific animations. Iamashaymin also made a Steam forums thread attempting to get Aspyr’s attention about it.
But don’t drag Aspyr over the coals just yet, because the studio said in that statement to IGN that, “When capturing placeholder footage for our announcement last fall, we mistakenly included content that is not in the product, and that mistake made it into the final cut.” Aspyr affirms that “The upcoming release of Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection does not include any code or content that is taken 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 hadn’t gotten its hands on it or hadn’t gotten it into a workable state by the time it was necessary to shoot a trailer for the game, and so relied on a mod to get the point across. When the game actually comes out, the Asajj you’ll find will be the Pandemic-official one. Or at least, Aspyr had better hope it will be if it doesn’t want another grilling from modders.
Aspyr’s been in rough spot recently. On the one hand, it’s apparently been yanked off its much-publicised KOTOR 1 remake in the wake of, well, whatever disaster it is that’s befallen that project. On the other, it’s annoyed legions of Switch fans by failing to make good on its promise to include KOTOR 2’s Restored Content Mod on that platform’s version of the game. It’s a company in desperate need of a win, in other words, and even relatively minor controversies like these don’t help.