14 DAY TRIAL // Following the communities outcry regarding the difficulty in unlocking the game heroes in Star Wars Battlefront II, EA decided to make them easier to purchase by slashing the prices.
People that have been playing Star Wars: Battlefront II before the official launch figured out that players would need to spend about 40 hours to get enough credits to unlock some of the more important characters, such as Darth Vader for example.
As if it wasn’t enough, Electronic Arts then decided that it would be a good idea to respond on Reddit to criticism by saying that they hoped users would get a feeling of accomplishment after they managed to unlock a hero. That particular comment is the most downvoted in Reddit’s history, and numerous jokes and memes spawned. It’s not the kind of thing you want before the launch.
Is slashing prices really enough?
Electronic Arts is now in damage control mode, and they did the only thing possible under these circumstances. The company has reduced the prices for unlocking the characters, substantially. That means that Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader no longer cost 60,000 credits, only 15,000.
Since the game is scheduled to arrive on November 17, Electronic Arts can’t do much more about it. The inertia of the gaming community is considerable, and it will take a long time for people to forget about this, and quite a few won’t even do that.
The truth is that Electronic Arts has pushed the micro-transaction craze just a little bit too far and the community has finally started to push back.
On another more serious note, the gaming community wasn’t all that upstanding either. One of the developers working on the game has received thousands of angry messages and a few death threats, on Twitter and other channels, just because he criticized the reaction of the community, calling them “armchair developers.” That really not OK.
It remains to be seen if these problems between Electronic Arts and the gaming community will have any impact on sales, as the game is scheduled to launch on November 17, for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, along with the other variants.