By this time next week there will be another cascade of poor business choices the wonderful folks over at Electronic Arts (EA) have strewn about all over DICE’s latest offering in the Star Wars universe; Battlefront II. DICE, known for the Battlefield games, have been a subsidiary of Electronic Arts since 2006.
Now don’t get me wrong – I played the original Battlefront games, made by EA-shuttered Pandemic Studios. These were massively popular, content-driven games where you could play as your favorite Star Wars characters in myriad situations – and at least Battlefront II (2005) still has online servers where the online still works and is quickly becoming a haven for a lot of people who are feeling shunted by EA/DICE’s 2015 and 2017 titles.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, here’s what’s wrong with 2017’s Battlefront II: pretty much everything. But let’s be fair – this is a PUBLISHER issue and definitely not a DEVELOPER issue. EA, the publisher, has decided to squeeze the life and money out of a game that, by all accounts, should be very good. Battlefront II utilizes the Frostbite engine, which is one of the most beautiful game engines on the planet, and they have a wealth of legacy content to use with the Star Wars brand and – shocker – EA has blown it. In a huge way.
Forbes, CNN, IGN, GameInformer, Destructoid, Kotaku, and multiple other outlets have put the steel to Battlefront II’s throat because of incessant microtransaction nonsense and a multiplayer progression system that is BAFFLING. So what’s the big deal?
Multiplayer progression is based on a credit system. In 2015’s Battlefront title you earned credits that were scaled with your score/points at the end of a match (you know, based on skill and performance in-game). Anyone familiar with DICE’s online titles (Battlefield 1, for instance) knows that these games can go on for quite a while and you can gain a lot of credits. Unfortunately, EA decided that the scaling system was too giving, and has decided that they’d rather cut and put a flat credit system in place. The ingenious part of this is, however, that you get a cap on arcade credits you can earn per day (like THIS one with a 15 hour lockout).
The issue with the above credit system is that unlocking Heroes & Villains (you know, the characters that Star Wars is built upon) cost credits to unlock and play in multiplayer. Unfortunately for people who don’t want to spend extra, real life dollars on loot boxes (ugh), the time to gain enough credits to unlock characters is ASTRONOMICAL. With people smarter than me doing the math, to unlock everything the game has to offer MIGHT take up to 2100 hours. While Battlefront II does have a single player campaign (unlike 2015’s release), and you DO gain credits from completing these missions – if you are offline or have a spotty connection, you don’t gain anything
Alongside the issues with multiplayer progression, loot boxes rear their ugly head towards the players and spew hot garbage onto the multiplayer arena – with ‘cards’ that will help you aim assist, have more damage on weapons, and the like. Loot boxes have been the talk of 2017 – with titles like Shadow Of War coming under fire with the absurd way of handling gambling to the masses. For those of you who don’t know, loot boxes (or crates, or bags, or whatever) are ways of spending in-game currency (credits, coins, gems, etc) on a random-chance grabbag of in-game items. When done positively (Overwatch, Rocket League, PUBG), these loot crates can be a fun way to add cosmetic changes to the game. When utilized negatively, where in-game content is hidden away behind the CHANCE of unlocking (Shadow of War) – that is where things get sticky.
When you lock away items that fundamentally change an aspect of a game (i.e. weapons, characters, etc) that CHANGE gameplay – especially in multiplayer – you have added an element of ‘grind’ to the game. You want to earn that in-game currency to spend on a crate for a chance to unlock a weapon / character / boost that will give you an edge competitively. In an industry that is so wrought with games becoming more and more piecemeal – the idea of locking stuff like this away is harmful – and it’s gaining a lot of attention from unexpected sources. Just this week French and Belgian legal minds have brought up if loot crates are gambling, and China has had policies in place to show the percentage of winning a particular item in loot crates for a while now.
While EA has decided to take greed to a whole new level, the landscape of gaming is changing – and not for the better. Outspoken games journalist Jim Sterling has railed against games doing this for at least the past year – if not longer. The changing of what constitutes as a complete game, where you pay for a complete game, feels like a time a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Wrestling With Subtitles 