EA Sports UFC 3 Beta Leads To Pay-To-Win Accusations

This week, EA have been running the closed beta for upcoming sports sim/fighting game EA Sports UFC 3, but in the wake of the ongoing Star Wars: Battlefront II microtransactions and loot box saga, players have been throwing the same accusations at UFC.

The concern boils down to the team’s Ultimate Team mode, where you create a squad of up to five fighters to compete in online bouts. In order to level up your character, you must open packs and obtain cards. These cards contain new moves or boosts to stats like punching power or limb durability, and the rarer that card is, the more powerful it’ll be. Sound familiar?

Many have equated this practice to Battlefront II, but the fact is that this is just the way Ultimate Team mode is and has always been, no matter what game its in. Replace the moves with players and it’s the same system as FIFA. Instead of buying packs to get good moves and stat increases, you’re buying packs to get better players and – well, stat increases. It’s precisely the same, yet only now has it become a problem.

The other key difference to Battlefront II, in fairness to UFC 3 and Ultimate Team mode, is that they’re only confined to Ultimate Team. In Battlefront, there’s no escape from the loot boxes. You want to play online, you have to engage with that kind of progression system. With UFC 3, interacting with that aspect of the game isn’t mandatory. You could just as easily stick to the career mode, or play online using default fighters. That doesn’t mean that the microtransactions in Ultimate Team aren’t egregious, it just goes some way to explaining why they flew under the radar for so long: it was much easier to ignore.

EA’s PR nightmare shows no signs of slowing down, with things like this not helping matters at all. Whether this means that EA begin to phase out loot boxes in all their games is a different story.

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