Star Wars Battlefront 2 Beta Loot Crates Are Making Fans Angry
The Star Wars Battlefront game released in 2015, while beautiful to look at, left a lot to be desired. The lack of a campaign turned many players away, and those who stuck with the title had a list of complaints: DLC fragmentation, hero tokens, and lack of customization among them. The team behind the game had vowed to solve those issues in the game's sequel, Battlefront 2, which is being released next month. The public beta, though, just hints at more problems.
The beta has been live since October 6 and it won't be going down until 1PM EST tomorrow afternoon. Enough time has passed for the title's biggest problem to become hugely apparent: the lackluster use of loot crates, which players will have to buy with either in-game credits earned during gameplay or with real-world money, prices yet to be determined.
In the 2015 iteration of the game, players were given the option of buying the DLCs to get full access to the game's heroes and maps. Players complained of a fragmented player base that resulted, and it was promised that things would change in a big way with the second game — namely, the pricey DLC would be eliminated altogether. That was great news that made many people skeptical.
Enter the public beta, which reveals to everyone the tradeoff that was made to get rid of the DLC: what amounts to a pay-to-win system that doesn't reward players based on their effort and skill, but rather for how many endless hours they're willing to grind away for meager crate parts or, more likely, how quickly they'll relent and pull out their credit card.
Players have noted that regardless of how well they performed in the game, everyone gets the same amount of credits at the end. This makes putting actual effort into the game essentially worthless. Star Cards, firearms, and modifications for those firearms are granted from loot crates, of which you get one daily. The rest must be purchased with in-game credits — which are doled out in the same quantity to everyone per game regardless of how well you performed — or with actual money (after spending at least $60 for the game itself).
A quick look at the Star Wars Battlefront subreddit shows that fans aren't happy with this arrangement at all. That's not to say that the game doesn't have its upsides, because it does — being able to play as heroes using Battle Points earned during a game rather than randomly finding a token is great, for example.
Still, the game as it exists in the public beta will essentially force players interested in progressing in the game to spend real money to get loot crates. Doesn't sound believable? YouTuber Angry Joe did some quick math to estimate how long a player will have to play to unlock the various guns. TL;DW: it's about 3,600 hours.
Compounding the problem is the completely random and uninspiring items included in the loot crates. Today, for example, I bought three loot crates with in-game credits. That gives nine items total, three per crate, and from them I got a total of 30 crate parts, three emotes, and one Darth Maul victory pose.
The remaining three items were cards, and two of them were described as 'common.' Not surprising, players aren't keen on the idea of paying real money for random crates that may just contain emotes and poses that few people care about.
Beta players are already feeling jaded, proclaiming speculation that EA purposely presented this awful loot crate system with the intent of presenting a slightly improved system at launch to make it seem more reasonable. Others are hoping this implementation will simply spell the end of these loot crate arrangements entirely.
SOURCE: Star Wars Battlefront 2