Star Wars Battlefront 2 PS4 PlayStation 4 1

No one could have predicted when DICE said it was doing away with community dividing DLC in Star Wars Battlefront 2 that things would turn out like this. The game has been absolutely slammed for its implementation of lootboxes and microtransactions – and as we near the title’s release, things actually seem to be getting worse.

One fan calculated over the weekend that, based on the current trickle of in-game credits, it’d take you about 40 hours to unlock a character like Luke Skywalker without investing real money. You can see his arithmetic for yourself through here. There are a few caveats, like the fact that his figures don't account for completing early game challenges, for example – but it’s not a good look either way.

An EA representative actually responded to the calculations on Reddit, claiming that it will be balancing things on a “daily basis”, and elsewhere that “the intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes”. Bizarrely, there’s some social media speculation suggesting that review code may be balanced differently – although we’ve been unable to verify.

Ultimately, it’s all a bit gross. While we don’t have access to review code just yet, we’ve already decided that we won’t be running our review until we’ve had time to see how everything works on retail servers. But given what we experienced in the beta, the real worry here is that DICE may have simply slapped a crappy monetisation model on top of an already pretty crappy game.

[source reddit.com, via reddit.com, reddit.com]