Cosmetic crates are handed out daily, and every weapon and ‘Star Card’ (class boosts and perks) is unlocked through gameplay. It took me a while to even find a way to spend real money in game, and the money can only go towards cosmetics that can also be earned in-game without too much difficulty. Those heroes that were locked behind awful paywalls at launch? They're all immediately playable now, including the many characters that have been added since launch. In March 2018, the whole microtransaction system was overhauled, and now, quite a while later, there’s no real sign for new players that the game was a catastrophe when it released. In the wake of the controversy, EA’s stock absolutely plummeted, and the game reportedly sold less than the first game, despite adding a campaign (which is, by the way, not very good, and not worth discussing further here).
It was a potentially very troubling sign of things to come, and the fallout was intense. At launch they were particularly heinous, locking away so much progression that the game players paid full price for felt undernourished. If you came into Star Wars Battlefront 2 completely fresh today, you’d have no idea that it had a disastrous launch.īattlefront 2 is the game that, more than any other, brought loot box concerns to the forefront of conversations around games.
