Electronic Arts' highly anticipated first-person shooter Star Wars Battlefront II will
come out Friday, but some players' excitement for the game has already been seriously tempered by frustration.
Subscribers to the gaming service EA Access, who get first dibs on some games during their pre-release trial period, figured out that unlocking playable heroes like Luke Skywalker requires either a 40-hour grind fest or pay-to-play. When that information hit Reddit, people got mad. So mad, in fact, that when an Electronic Arts' representative jumped into the Reddit thread to allay people's fears, the rep's comment became the most downvoted in Reddit's history, getting over 436,000 downvotes in 24 hours as of this writing.
In response to backlash from the player community, John Wasilczyk, executive producer at DICE, the game developer of Battlefront II, acknowledged in a message on EA's site there has been a lot of discussion about in-game credits. He also said the company is reducing the amount of credits needed to unlock the top characters like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader by 75 percent.
EA's John Reseburg laid out the credit change in an email to CNET.
"Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will now be available for 15,000 credits [down from 60,000 credits], Emperor Palpatine, Chewbacca and Leia Organa for 10,000 credits and Iden at 5,000 credits. Based on what we've seen in the Trial, this amount will make earning these heroes an achievement, but one that will be accessible for all players. The change will be live today, with an update that is getting loaded into the Play First Trial now and also the full game when it launches. We're not stopping there as we're going to keep making changes to make the experience better."
The Star Wars Battlefront franchise originally launched in 2004, and the reboot for modern consoles came in April 2015, once again giving players the opportunity to take part in the beloved franchise with updated graphics. It let players fly X-wing fighters, mow down rebels while driving Imperial Walkers, and even wield lightsabers while playing as characters such as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker from the original movie trilogy. https://www.cnet.com/news/star-wars-battlefront-ii-reddit-micro-transactions/
