With three days to still go before its full release, Star Wars: Battlefront II has been hit with one controversy after another. The monetisation system in particular has been the subject of heavy criticism, and Electronic Arts’ attempts to douse the flames have led to only further fury over the past few days. While changes have been promised, the question is if they are enough. Or, for that matter, what lengths the company will go to in order to secure its sales numbers.

Over the past several hours multiple reports have been made on both EA’s technical support forum and Reddit page claiming that they can no longer request refunds. This has led to many customers alleging that the refund option on Origin itself has been disabled for this game, and that they have seemingly no option to back out of this purchase. EA itself has yet to respond to these comments, but with growing numbers of understandably disgruntled customers.

The only good news surrounding the game of late is that the company has responded to criticisms, claiming that they will be shortening the grind needed to unlock most heroes. However, the question still remains if anything can be salvaged from this entire situation.

Update Electronic Arts has responded to these criticisms with the following statement:

“For clarity… the self-service refund option is only available if you have not been charged for the product yet. After that point, you can call EA Help to get a refund.
Currently, you will be billed if you have pre-ordered the standard edition, and therefore would need to call EA Help to get a refund.
You can read the Refund Policy and request a refund here: https://help.ea.com/en/help/account/returns-and-cancellations/
Update: We realize that this system isn’t as clear as we’d hoped, so we’re working to roll out an update in the near future that will improve it.”

Nevertheless, despite this claim, there are still a number of notable oddities surrounding how Battlefront II handles its refunds. As noted by PCGamesN, this has been a reoccurring problem with pre-order titles, where Origin is only listing certain versions of the game on its refund page and forcing all others to go through customer services. However, all documents and information present on the platform suggests that a customer should be able to directly refund a pre-order through Origin itself, and makes no mention of this.

While a substantial amount of this backlash can be put down to poor communication on the publisher’s part, this also highlights how this has been a long-running problem for Origin. The inability to easily refund pre-orders directly has been occurring for some time and, as cited on the aforementioned article, examples can be found as far back as 2013.

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