Battlefront 2

Quote from dux

6 hours ago, dux said: Pretty buggy release it seems. EA content to rush this out the door ontop of everything else.

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Yeah agreed on Blizzard/Activision - pretty pot kettle stuff there. The loot box stuff in Overwatch isn't great and It's why I never bought it. It's the same old story though, developers dicking over good talented teams with dumb ideas.

No offense mate, but I think throwing loot boxes that contain skins (Overwatch) and loot boxes that contain characters, abilities among other things (SW:BF2) into the same pot is an extremist view and not really constructive. There are big differences between the systems and the differences in the public's reaction to them is proving that.

EDIT: Just saw this thread by another designer that explains in more detail what I am alluding to:

A loot box is a loot box to me. Publishers seewhat Overwatch did and thought "Hmm, how far can we take this?" As Dark said, they are designed to exploit you. I'm not calling Overwatch a bad game for it, nor am I calling SWBF2 a bad game either. All I'm attacking is publishers and loot boxes.

Quote from dux

13 minutes ago, dux said: A loot box is a loot box to me. Publishers seewhat Overwatch did and thought "Hmm, how far can we take this?" As Dark said, they are designed to exploit you. I'm not calling Overwatch a bad game for it, nor am I calling SWBF2 a bad game either. All I'm attacking is publishers and loot boxes.

Wasn't Valve in it before Blizzard?

I don't know who started it, but Blizzard certainly made it as predominant as it is now I think.

Don't worry guys, The Empire will strike back!

But, honestly, despite the bad publicity, I think this will play in EA's favor. Every media outlet and gaming youtuber has promoted Battlefront 2. And most of them have said that it's a good game buried underneath microtransactions. Now that microtransactions are temporarily turned off what do you have? Of course, once sales estimates are back on track..

Quote from Radu

46 minutes ago, Radu said: Don't worry guys, The Empire will strike back!

But, honestly, despite the bad publicity, I think this will play in EA's favor. Every media outlet and gaming youtuber has promoted Battlefront 2. And most of them have said that it's a good game buried underneath microtransactions. Now that microtransactions are temporarily turned off what do you have? Of course, once sales estimates are back on track..

That's why some Danish police dept is making fun of them by somewhat comparing it to as scam

All they needed to do was make crates cosmetics only and everyone would have loved it. I'm sure EA have the creative license to make new helmets for the storm troopers, new heads or bodies for the droids and all the different camo patterns you can think of. They're big enough to push for that creative freedom from Disney.

Imagine you could customise your storm trooper armour with different boots, breastplates, capes, visors, insignia and everything in between. People would be buying crates like hot cakes.

It was a bad idea putting stat-changing items in a loot box.

Quote from Beck

4 hours ago, Beck said: All they needed to do was make crates cosmetics only and everyone would have loved it. I'm sure EA have the creative license to make new helmets for the storm troopers, new heads or bodies for the droids and all the different camo patterns you can think of. They're big enough to push for that creative freedom from Disney.

Imagine you could customise your storm trooper armour with different boots, breastplates, capes, visors, insignia and everything in between. People would be buying crates like hot cakes.

It was a bad idea putting stat-changing items in a loot box.

Maybe they did hit a creative wall with Disney in that regard. You know how slow it is to get stuff back and fourth with big organizations and especially have them approved. Then again, you're right about EA being big enough to push for that option.

I might be wrong here, but I think they're trying to go for something similar to Paladins. The game allows players to enhance or modify a character's abilities through a card system. These cards can be purchased by using a special currency that is only obtainable from duplicates and completing quests/challenges. So, you can't really straight up buy these cards, but you can purchase loot boxes which drop cards and transform duplicates into the required currency. Mind you, the game has 4 currency types: crystals, essence(used for cards), gold and vip points. I haven't worked out why there are so many of them, but I'm sure there's a catch. Though, an important thing to mention is that the game is F2P and progression seems quite fast. You even get basic loot boxes as reward after a few matches. There are currently 34 characters and you can unlock all of them in roughly 150 hours, as well as a great portion of the cards.

I've been following the whole lootcrate fiasco a bit this week and was thinking about it a lot. I wonder where this corporate greed will lead our industry. For the time being this seems to be here to stay, maybe slowed down a bit, while publishers will continue to think of more schemes secretly.

I think what must and will happen eventualy, could be a couple years from now, is is that the industry will have to agree on a code for ethical buisness practices. Otherwise it's only a question of time that some governments or maybe the EU will want to hop in and regulate. This can work. We've seen it in the past with the ESRB, USK etc. organizations for self regulation. Right now it's the wild west out there.

It took Mortal Kombat to get a violence ratings system. It'll probably take a few more SWBF2's to get a gambling rating.

Belgium just declared loot crates as gambling. Woop.

Hawaii State (apparently with other States) is looking at introducing legislation to declare lootcrates gambling as soon as next year

a "gambling" rating for games doesn't look too improbable now. I just wonder how they will enforce a forbid to sale - I don't know if retailers would sell an underage person a game labelled "M", but at least in Italy I think they just might be.

PS: like people in the comments of that tweet, I'm not so sure how happy we should be about governments stepping in to regulate video-games. I want the blood in video games to stay red, so to speak.

Star War themed online casino. That phrase probably had Disney going crazy. They're not even calling it a game they're calling it a casino! This is probably going to have some knock on effects for everyone in the gaming world. Maybe we'll see the end of loot boxes and we'll just be able to buy what we want in the future?

I doubt we'll see the end of microtransactions though. Devs/publishers will just find another way to package it. I saw a good comment somewhere saying we should stop calling them microtransactions, it's not a microtransaction when you're dropping tens or even hundreds of £/$ on keys to open crates to hopefully get an item you want. Those are some big transactions!

I don’t have a problem with micro transactions, if they complement a cheap game… putting them on top of a full priced game is dirty.

I guess EA needs to recoup the money of the license…

I wonder, Disney must be getting a cut on sales? Is it really get the license and then hands-off?

I mean we are talking about EA as the greedy entity but let’s not forget Disney is on a full-on campaign to maximise profits: they have announced they’re creating their own streaming service for example, so we should expect all Disney/Marvel/Star Wars contenta to disappear from everywhere else. Apparently a Star Wars TV show is being discussed, and we know they’ve made this ginormous deal with EA for games.