Stunning Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass Details Arrive

Some pretty stunning Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass and Ultimate Edition details have potential buyers of Star Wars Battlefront feeling a bit upset this morning. That’s because getting every piece of downloadable content for the game will cost more than $100.

Star Wars Battlefront publisher Electronic Arts announced in a post late yesterday afternoon that there was indeed a Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass coming for buyers of the game. The announcement shocked some; the game’s release date is next month and we hadn’t heard anything about a season pass before now. Star Wars Battlefront is a massive battle simulation with players taking on the role as soldiers in either the Rebel Alliance or the Galactic Empire. Battles and dogfights happen on planets and locations taken straight out of the Star Wars movies. Even Luke and Darth Vader appear as playable characters.

That Star Wars Battlefront will have downloadable content isn’t what’s shocking. What’s shocking is just how much Electronic Arts is charging for access to that content. A Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass costs $49.99 on the Xbox Store, PlayStation Store and Origin PC gaming service. That’s a huge amount compared to other season passes, which usually top out at around $30. It’s also a stunning amount of money when you consider that the base copy of Star Wars Battlefront itself costs $59.99.

Electronic Arts says that Star Wars Battlefront Season Pass holders will get access to four different expansion packs that’ll be released after the base game is available. In addition to the expansion packs, Electronic Arts plans on giving users who purchase a season pass access to the content two weeks before it’s available to users to buy on its own without the season pass. Buyers also get a Shoot first emote, a kind of character reaction for use in the game.

Things get even more interesting when you take into account Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition. Ultimate Edition is also a new purchase option for players come November. Getting the Ultimate Edition will unlock the content of the base game, what’s in the expansions and what users would have gotten if they’d have purchased the Star Wars Battlefront Deluxe Edition. According to GameStop, the Deluxe Edition includes access to an Ion Grenades, Han Solo’s Blaster, MPL Ion Torpedo and two emotes. Star Wars Battlefront Deluxe Edition is already $69.99, $10 more than the base price of the game.

Strangely enough, EA doesn’t clarify pricing for Star Wars Battlefront Ultimate Edition in this week’s post at all. Theoretically, it’ll have to cost more than the base game and the Season Pass together. That’s at least $110, but it could cost more. We won’t know that until Electronic Arts begins offering the Ultimate Edition to shoppers, which it hasn’t yet. Already, Xbox One, PC and Origin users can pre-order the Star Wars Ultimate Edition Season Pass.

To be clear, these days all video games have season passes. The season passes are an option, a way for users to get a slight discount for new content instead of paying full price for each piece of content that they want for a game. In fact, season passes were heralded as a way to keep a lid on the rising cost of expansions for video games, which reached $15 per add-on for some games.

Season passes come with their own fundamental issues though. For example, EA is only confirming that users will get four different expansions. It hasn’t announced how much those expansions will cost individually or what they’ll contain. Without that information shoppers are buying on pure faith, hoping that making an early decision about add-on content now will pay off in the long run. Sometimes that’s not always the case.

Batman: Arkham Knight’s season pass cost $39.99 and PC owners are still waiting to get content promised for that game. Sometimes add-on content can be too short or buggy, another problem that plagued Batman: Arkham Knight’s season pass.

The Star Wars Battlefront release day is November 17th.