Pope John Paul II Joins Star Wars Battlefront 2

Star Wars Battlefront II hit a variety of snags when it was initially released, though it has since managed to overcome these stumbles. Much of this has included some comprehensive patches in the years since its release. Since then, it has become increasingly popular, especially in the modding community. While much of this has been focused on adding new Star Wars characters to the game, there has been a few surprising additions modded in.

The most recent, and perhaps unique, is Pope John Paul II, who served as the head of the Catholic church from 1978 until 2005, when he passed. Modder xD0IT used the character model of the recently released Kylo Ren as a base before customizing a variety of aspects. Naturally, this was quite a time-consuming process, especially considering what the late Pope comes with.

Alongside his standard appearance, the (unofficial) character comes with two other skins, a yellow lightsaber, a custom portrait, and Star Cards. You can see him in action in the video below. While xD0IT released a statement explaining why he chose to add the character to Star Wars Battlefront II, it doesn’t exactly explain much. The statement in full reads: “Here, in this town, in Wadowice everything has started.”

This is a reference to Wadowice, Poland, where the man formerly known as Karol Józef Wojtyła would be born before becoming Pope at age 58. However, this isn’t the only thing that xD0IT has been up to recently. In contrast, he’s created and uploaded a variety of other mods in the past few weeks alone. These have included a skin that turns Lando Calrissian into Krzysztof Krawczyk, a Polish pop singer.

The modder has also added various other Polish people into the game, with many of them being real people. Some of the more notable have been Janusz Korwin-Mikke, a prominent politican and philosopher, and Jerzy Urban, a Polish journalist and writer. However, adding Pope John Paul II to Star Wars Battlefront 2 is still one of the more surprising moves in recent years.

Initially, the game was off to a bad start when it was first released. Much of this focused on its use of microtransations and lootboxes which players were quite disappointed by. As the modding community and playerbase is still active, however, it looks as though Star Wars Battlefront 2 has made a recovery from its mishaps. The game is currently available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.