EA has been under a lot of fire recently when it comes to the release of Star Wars Battlefront II which comes out later this week for the PlayStation 4 Xbox One and PC. As the company has shown with many of their previous releases, it’s all about making that money, especially when it comes down to Microtransactions.
Before the Battlefront II Beta was released, DICE introduced the Star Card system which let players upgrade their characters abilities and weapons. That wasn’t the only thing introduced as the Epic Star Cards which were the highest tier of Star Cards was also shown, which could further power up a players abilities and weapons but their was a small problem. To obtain Star Cards you would have to buy Loot Boxes which could be bought with in game currency or real world money, which you can read more about in our previous coverage.
This wasn’t the only major issue fans have criticized the game over as it was recently revealed on Reddit that the series iconic characters including Luke Skywaler, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Chewbacca, Leia Organa and Battlefront II’s silent protagonist Iden were all hidden behind a major pay wall. Originally unlocking Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader would cost you 60,000 credits each, as you earn 275 credits per match (win or lose) it was calculated that it would take nearly 40 hrs of gameplay to unlock each of these characters and combined with unlocking the rest of the characters would rack up to almost 200 hours and that’s if you don’t buy anything else. This was seen as a shameless money grab by the community especially on Reddit where a post by EA explaining that their choice of doing this was to reward dedicated players for all their hard work was down voted almost 500k times, making it the most disliked post on Reddit ever. Gamespot even spent $100 in Loot boxes which still wasn’t enough to purchase either of Luke or Darth Vader, as it calculated it would cost almost $260 to unlock one character.
This was seen as a way for EA to get players to spend more money on Loot Boxes which could then be converted to credits in an attempt to get the characters faster. Why would you need to spend so much time to use characters that are iconic and part of the series, it makes absolutely no sense.
Well the community has one once again, sort of. John Wasilczyk, executive producer at DICE, the game developer of Battlefront II recently posted on the Star Wars Battlefront II website that the company is listening to feedback and due to the strong support of the fans, the company will be rolling back the cost of all of the characters by 75%. This means that rather than the 200,000+ credits needed to unlock every character is now 65,000 credits which will take take around 40 hours or so, which was pretty much the cost of Luke or Vader originally.
While this means it will take a lot less time to unlock the characters playing the game normally, those willing to spend plenty of money on top of the game’s $60 price tag will be able to enjoy and play as iconic Star Wars character much faster.
So are you planning on buying a few loot boxes right away or earn your characters through regular play if you are picking up the game?