Post Script

Greed shot first: why Battlefront II’s loot boxes represent a line in the sand for the industry

The bitter irony here is that the three studios involved in this project fulfilled their brief to the letter. DICE made a bigger, more rounded multiplayer mode. New EA studio Motive delivered a beautiful, if predictable, singleplayer campaign filled to bursting with lavish fan service. Criterion put its Burnout and Need For Speed experience to fine use in its design of Battlefront II’s vehicles. This was a project doomed not on the shop floor but in the boardroom, and in an emerging discipline of data-driven, psychologically manipulative design, a game built in an engine and killed in a spreadsheet. It was born in the free-to-play space, where monetisation is the only way to keep the lights on. This proves it ought to stay there.

We have, so far, opted to stay out of the loot-box debate. After all, development costs have skyrocketed over the years, while retail prices have remained the same, even ignoring inflation. After horse armour, alternative costumes, on-disc DLC, season and online passes and all the rest of it, loot crates, at first, felt like merely the latest attempt by the game industry to balance the books. And besides, loot is fun, a dopamine reward for a job well done that makes the next job on your list a little easier, and hopefully more enjoyable.

There is no fun here, and after a few-dozen hours butting our heads against the e brick wall of Battlefront II’s ‘progression’ system, it has as become abundantly clear that Edge needs to treat t loot, and more widely, monetisation, as a core part of a game’s design. While we have previously been able to separate the two – believing that a game and its finances should be treated as mutually exclusive – EA has as proven otherwise. Here the two feel inescapably pably intertwined. The standard digital edition of Star ar Wars Battlefront II costs a penny under £60. An extra £20 nets you the Elite Trooper Deluxe Edition, which ch offers two exclusive hero costumes, and then a series ries of shortcuts through the game’s progression system. m. You’ll be given instant access to two heroes that would uld otherwise need to be bought with hard-earned credits, dits, some powerful Card Cards for them, and weapons that the hoi polloi will need to unlock by racking up 200 kills with each class of infantry. The message, from m the get-go, is clear: either submit to the RNG gods ds through loot crates while grinding out kills in multiplayer, ultiplayer, or pay up to bypass it all and give yourself f an immediate advantage on the battlefield.

This is cynical in the extreme, eme, sure – but worse, it is stupid, merely shortening the stick to which a pretty disappointing-looking carrot is attached. It’s a recurring theme in a multiplayer game that immediately sets about facing the player with uncomfortable, even dumb, decisions that somehow, whichever way they lean, make you feel you’re making the wrong choice. Early on, you quickly come to understand that you either spend credits on loot crates in the hope of getting something cool for your chosen infantry class, or save up for a hero. Pick the former and, if your luck’s not in – if you pop open a crate and get a couple of emotes, a skin and a Star Card for a class you’ve never used, say – you’ll wish you’d saved up. Pick the latter, and while you’re grinding out credits, you’ll wonder if each lost match or firefight might have gone differently if you’d focused on the loot system instead.

If you think that saving up for a hero or villain is going to be the answer to your problems, think again. EA hints at it in the way that there’s no fanfare when you finally acquire a character; their menu icon simply turns from black-and-white to full colour. Once you head into a match, another unpleasant decision awaits. To ensure that those unlockable characters feel valuable, they are priced at up to 8,000 Battle Points, the performance-based currency you earn during play.

That’s a lofty goal, and you can spend less on alternatives that may not carry a lightsaber but will, for a quarter of the price, give you an advantage over the enemy’s y rank and file. It’s the same decision: do you spend now, or later? Cough up now for a 2,000 point supertrooper and yo you won’t get a Skywalker this match, but you might get th the win. Which, given the long-term investment you’ve m made, is the more important to you? That you are even fa faced with that decision in a game of war is ridiculous. So is the game as a whole.

This is a publishe publisher that will always, it seems, cop more flak for its dub dubious endeavours than any other company in the industry. indu The infamous fuss over Mass Effect 3’ s ending saw EA voted the worst company in America in one onlin online poll, beating out the likes of Halliburton and Phil Philip Morris. The following year the always-online SimCity SimCi earned the publisher the title again, ahead of the li likes of Bank Of America and Comcast. A commun community manager’s attempt to defuse the tension over hero-unlock her costs in the EA Access trial of Battlefront II resulted in the most-downvoted post in Reddit histor history. Clearly the internet consensus has it that EA deserv deserves the rawest of deals.

Battlefront II prov proves it right for once. It is a game that offers up a prog progression system that rewards those who pay up, punishe punishes severely those that don’t and infects every part th that matters of an otherwiseenjoyable multiplaye multiplayer game. It will go down in history as the case-study ex example of what happens when monetisation goes to too far. It proves that a dollar sign has no place on a design document. Above all, it ensures we wo won’t be falling for it again.

Loot crates, at first, felt like merely the latest attempt by the game industry to balance the books