Star Wars Battlefront II is a few days away from launch, but it’s already in the running for the most controversial and contentious game releases this year.
After getting considerable feedback from their open beta, publisher EA has made changes to how you unlock weapons and characters in the next upcoming adventure in a galaxy far far away. What went from a multiplayer game where everything was unlocked through randomly generated loot boxes, from new characters to unfair special ability boosts, became a bit more structured with certain characters and weapons unlocked either by leveling up or saving up in-game Credits to buy them.
But even this system is receiving negativity. Players who have pre-ordered the game have early access to it now for the first ten hours and are expressing shear distaste at how incomprehensible it all is. One of the biggest selling points of the game, the ability to play as iconic characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, are locked behind large pay walls. Some users have even calculated that to unlock one of them would take north of forty hours of game time.
EA once again have addressed this. In an official statement on their website, DICE Executive Producer John Wazilczyk announced that an update would reduce the cost of unlocking heroes by about seventy-five percent across the board. He also went on to say that Star Wars Battlefront II would be constantly changing in order to make things fun for everyone.
It’s a bold move by EA and credit has to be given to DICE being open to constructive feedback for one of 2017’s biggest profile releases. However, it might be too little too late. Loot boxes and pay-to-win tactics have slipping into AAA gaming for the past couple of years and Star Wars Battlefront II might just be the most egregious example to date. Despite a lot of the work put in by the developer to mitigate this by trying to make it easier to earn things in-game, that ongoing temptation to just shell out the cash continues to undermine it.
