Star Wars Battlefront II’s Hero Starfighters Update Still Deserves a Small Victory Lap

Some Star Wars Battlefront II updates were loud because they added giant headline content.

Others were quieter, but did a lot of the dirty work that made the game better to actually play.

The Hero Starfighters Update, released on this day in 2018, sits somewhere in the middle. It added a new hero ship mode, brought in Sullustan appearances for Rebel and Resistance Assault troopers, and pushed through a bundle of quality-of-life changes that helped smooth out some of the rough edges around the game.

Not the flashiest update in Battlefront II history.

Still important.

Hero Starfighters Was the Big Addition

The headline feature was Hero Starfighters, an 8-player mode focused on hero ships battling each other in elimination-style rounds.

It was a neat idea, especially because Battlefront II always had some excellent starfighter work hiding in plain sight. Criterion’s space combat felt fast, heavy, and cinematic in the right way, but the mode never quite became the main attraction for most players.

Hero Starfighters tried to give the big-name ships their own stage.

The Millennium Falcon. Slave I. Darth Maul’s Scimitar. Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer. Poe’s X-wing. The kind of ships players actually recognize before immediately crashing them into debris because space combat confidence is a dangerous thing.

Was Hero Starfighters the mode that changed the game forever?

No.

But it gave starfighter players something more focused, and that mattered in a game where the ground modes usually ate most of the oxygen.

Sullustans Finally Joined the Wardrobe

The update also added the Sullustan appearance for the Rebel and Resistance Assault class.

Tiny thing? Maybe.

But cosmetics were a huge part of Battlefront II’s long recovery arc. After the launch mess, the game gradually became better at giving players more visual variety without dragging the whole experience back into the monetization mud pit.

Sullustans were a perfect little addition. Not a massive franchise face. Not another hero skin everyone had been screaming about. Just a classic Rebel alien species that made the battlefield feel slightly more like Star Wars and slightly less like a human infantry convention with lasers.

Sometimes that is enough.

The Quality-of-Life Changes Were the Real Work

The Hero Starfighters Update also did something Battlefront II badly needed at the time: it made several systems less annoying.

Players could swap Trooper and Hero appearances before a round, which seems obvious now but was a welcome change then. Lightsaber users got stamina changes for blocking, including a visible stamina count and delayed regeneration. The update also added the ability to turn lightsabers on and off during gameplay, which is deeply unnecessary and completely essential at the same time.

Hero Showdown received HUD improvements showing teammate and opponent health, while Strike got clearer objective delivery zones in the world. Daily quests were also reworked to give three quests per day instead of one.

None of that sounds dramatic in a trailer.

But it is the sort of thing that makes a multiplayer game feel less like it is fighting the player between matches.

A Reminder of Battlefront II’s Long Comeback

Looking back, the Hero Starfighters Update is a good snapshot of where Battlefront II was in mid-2018.

The game was still rebuilding trust. Still trying to prove it could become more than the disaster story everyone remembered from launch. The big Clone Wars era push was still ahead, and the massive goodwill swing had not fully arrived yet.

But the pieces were starting to move.

New modes. More cosmetics. Better menus. Cleaner HUD information. Small features that respected how people actually played the game.

That was the real story of Battlefront II after launch. Not one magical fix. Not one heroic update. Just a long chain of additions, adjustments, and course corrections that slowly turned a controversial game into one people still talk about with weird affection.

The Hero Starfighters Update was not the biggest step in that journey.

But it was a step.

And for a game that spent so much time climbing out of its own crater, those counted.