Since its controversial business model was revealed, Star Wars Battlefront II has caused plenty of concern amongst fans. Microtransactions seemed like they would directly affect gameplay, giving an unfair advantage to those who want to spend extra to get ahead with more powerful Star Cards.
In the time following its open beta, EA have been on damage control. As well as promising that the beta was just a testing ground, a developer from DICE appeared on Angry Joe’s YouTube channel to try to quell some concerns while also saying almost nothing.
Before its wider launch, those who are subscribed to EA Access have been able to play some of the game early, which has done nothing to persuade fans that they aren’t going to be in for a rough ride. According to TheHotterPotato’s detailed research on Reddit, the time it takes to unlock certain Heroes is many more hours than is sane, owing to Battlefront II’s progression system being tied to time played rather than skill.
Judging by their figures, players will have to wade through 40 hours of multiplayer action before they can unlock Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, who cost 60000 credits. For each match of Galactic Assault, players can earn 250 credits. If you’re playing ten minutes per round, that all adds up to a lot of forced playtime. Additionally, a Trooper Crate, which gives players new items and Star Cards, costs 4000 credits. With microtransactions in the game’s absolutely unapproachable economy system making it far quicker to unlock Star Cards, fan backlash is only growing.
Following TheHotterPotato’s post, another user took to the Battlefront subreddit to air their annoyances:
“This is a joke. I’ll be contacting EA support for a refund… I can’t even playing fucking Darth Vader?!?!? Disgusting. This age of “micro-transactions” has gone WAY too far. Leave it to EA though to stretch the boundaries.”
Unaware of the history they were about to make, a member of the EA Community Team responded with the following canned response that, again, was just a bunch of jargon that means nothing:
“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we’re looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we’ll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.”
It’s only been up for fourteen hours, but the response already holds the record for the most downvoted comment on Reddit with an astonishing -126k downvotes at the time of writing.
For context, according to this list, the next most downvoted comment on Reddit is some guy asking to be downvoted. They still have 100k less downvotes, however, with a comparatively paltry -24.2k points. At least EA are the best at being the worst.
To makes matters worse, the dev response to the initial findings has a downvote count of -3384 at the time of writing. I don’t think that will improve.
While news that Battlefront II would have no paid DLC was met positively, there was no way that EA wouldn’t look to recoup that money elsewhere – publishing games is a business, first and foremost. However, they could have approached it almost any other way and faced a lot less fury, particularly if they had just tied microtransactions and crates to cosmetics. That being said, preferring one form of microtransaction over another says a lot about the state of play in the industry right now.
So, um, are you still going to buy Battlefront II?
UPDATE: Half a million downvotes. Wow.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
