How to Install Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) and Join a Server

You launch a fighter out of your capital ship, fly across open space with turret fire going past you, and put the thing down inside the enemy's hangar. Then you get out and walk around inside their ship, on foot, shooting the systems that make it work.

Nobody had done that in 2005. A great many games have promised something like it since and rather fewer have delivered it, and the fact that a licensed tie-in shooter managed it two decades ago is the reason Star Wars: Battlefront II is still discussed at all.

This guide is about the 2005 game by Pandemic, not the 2017 one that shares its name. Listings for it collect on the game's hub, and the naming problem is the first practical thing to sort out.

Three games, one name

This trips up everybody, including people who owned the original.

Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) is this one. Pandemic Studios, LucasArts, released in the middle of the last console generation but one. It has space battles, a single-player campaign told from a clone trooper's point of view, and a strategic mode called Galactic Conquest.

Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) is the EA and DICE game. Entirely different, made twelve years later, and the reason a search for this title returns mostly the wrong thing.

Star Wars: Battlefront (2004) is the first Pandemic game. No space combat, and a smaller roster.

There is a fourth confusion worth heading off: on this site "BF2" without the Star Wars prefix means Battlefield 2, which is an unrelated game from the same year with its own server scene. The abbreviations collide constantly.

The multiplayer came back, which is unusual

Here is the interesting part of this game's history, and it is genuinely rare.

The PC version's online play originally ran through a third-party matchmaking service that a great many games of that era shared. That service was switched off in 2014, and the multiplayer of dozens of titles died with it on the same day. Most of them stayed dead.

This one did not. In 2017 the digital release received an update that restored online multiplayer, routed through the store platform's own networking rather than the defunct service. A twelve-year-old game got its multiplayer back, largely because a new game with the same name was about to launch and somebody decided the old one deserved the attention.

That is worth knowing for two reasons. It means the game is playable rather than merely ownable. And it means guides written between 2014 and 2017 will tell you the multiplayer is gone, which was true when they were written and is not true now.

What you are actually playing

Two eras, four factions. The Clone Wars pits the Republic against the Separatists; the Galactic Civil War pits the Rebels against the Empire. Each has its own units rather than a shared template with different colours.

Conquest is the main mode: capture and hold command posts, and take the enemy's reinforcement count to zero. Reinforcements are a shared pool rather than individual lives, which means every death costs the team something and holding posts drains the enemy passively.

Assault, Capture the Flag and Hunt fill out the rest, each on their own subset of maps.

Space Assault is the mode described at the top — two capital ships facing each other across open space, with the option to leave your fighter inside the enemy's hangar and carry on by hand.

Galactic Conquest wraps the whole thing in a strategic layer where you take planets one at a time.

Classes and heroes

Each faction has a set of basic infantry roles — a rifle-carrying trooper, a heavy with rockets, a sniper, an engineer who repairs and mines — plus two specialists unique to that side. The Separatist droideka rolls into a room and unfolds into something nobody wants to be near. The Empire's dark troopers fly. Wookiees hit very hard. The specialists are what give each faction its character, and they are limited in number so that a team is not composed entirely of them.

Then there are heroes. Play well enough and you become Vader, or Luke, or Yoda, or one of the others, for a limited stretch. A hero on the field is not a small advantage; it is a problem the other team has to organise around, and hearing that one has spawned changes what everybody does next.

It is the most obviously fan-serving thing in the game and it works completely.

The planets

The map list reads like a tour of the films, which was the point. Hoth's trenches and walkers. The forest floor of Endor. Theed's plazas on Naboo. The trees of Kashyyyk. Geonosis, Kamino, Utapau, Mustafar, Coruscant, Felucia, Mygeeto, the Death Star, Mos Eisley, Jabba's palace, Bespin.

Each one plays differently in a way that goes well beyond decoration. An open snowfield and a corridor system inside a space station ask for completely different things — from the vehicles, from the sightlines, from the shape a fight is allowed to take.

Getting it and getting in

Buy it and install it through whichever store you got it from.New to Steam? Our Steam guide covers the account and the settings worth changing on day one.

It is a 2005 game, so it runs on anything, and it will need telling about your resolution rather than working it out. Expect to set that manually and expect the interface to have been designed for a 4:3 screen.

Finding a server

The multiplayer menu has an internet server list, and unlike most games of this vintage it works, because the networking was rebuilt rather than abandoned.

The list is short. That is the honest position: this is a two-decade-old licensed shooter with a devoted following rather than a large one, and the population concentrates onto a handful of servers that fill in their own local evenings. A list that looks thin at midday is a different list at nine at night, and checking once and concluding the game is dead is the most common mistake people make about every game on this site.

The hub is where listings collect, and how to find servers worth playing on covers the reasoning behind picking one and returning to it rather than sampling.

Where a direct address is offered

Take the whole thing including the port. Anyone hosting more than one game on a machine has moved most of them off the default, and an address handed over without its port fails in a way indistinguishable from the server being offline. This is the single most common self-inflicted failure in joining a community server on any game.

If a listing looks too good for the game's size, our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy are worth the minute.

The mod scene is the reason people stayed

This is the part that a guide focused on connecting would miss, and it is the real answer to why the game is still played.

Battlefront II has an unusually deep modding community for a licensed console-era title. People have built new maps, new eras, new factions, conversions that take the game into other corners of the setting entirely, and fixes for things Pandemic never got to. Some of it is better made than the original content.

The practical relevance is that a modded server is a different game from a vanilla one, and the description matters. A server running a large conversion expects you to have the files, and the community running it will tell you where they are and which version they want.

For a first evening, find a vanilla server. Learn the maps and the classes before adding a layer of content that assumes you know both.

Problems you will actually hit

A guide told you the multiplayer is dead. It was, between 2014 and 2017. Check the date on anything you read about this game.

You bought the wrong Battlefront II. The 2017 game is a different product with a different everything. Check the release year on the store page.

The game will not use your resolution. Set it manually in the video options. Games of this age do not detect modern displays.

Everything looks stretched. Aspect ratio, same menu, same cause.

You keep dying to a hero. That is what heroes are for. Do not fight one alone; take the command post they are not standing on and let the reinforcement drain do the work.

Vehicles are everywhere and you cannot get one. They respawn on a timer at fixed points, and the regulars know the timers. That knowledge is most of the difference between a new player and an experienced one on the larger maps.

Where to go next

For Star Wars specifically, the Jedi Knight games are the other pillar of that era's multiplayer and are still running on communities that have kept them going for twenty years. Different game entirely — lightsabers, movement, duelling servers with their own elaborate etiquette — and a genuinely healthy scene.

For the mode rather than the licence, Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 1942 are the games Conquest came from, both still hosting community servers with custom content. Unreal Tournament 2004 is the other survivor from that year, with vehicles and objectives of its own and an unusually stubborn population.

Halo sits in the same period and the same conversation about console shooters that turned out to have long PC lives.

If it is the space combat you want back, be prepared for disappointment. Very few games have attempted a fighter battle that lets you land in the enemy's hangar and continue on foot, and none of them made it look as easy as this one did in 2005.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005) servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.