You might have to pump the breaks on getting into some hot Bossk action on the field.
EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront 2 already waded into a minefield with the loot boxes (getting real sick of typing out loot boxes… dammit!). But there is another… controversy with the game.
As it turns out, characters you might want, like Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker are locked from the start. And, as one Reddit user figured out, just unlocking them in the first place will take you about 40 hours. Not considering one time payouts from completing challenges, of course:
Almost 3 hours of gameplay required to earn a trooper crate at the current rate. I understand these values don’t include what you earn in challenges, but I am mainly doing this to figure out what it’s going to be like after the first week and I am done chasing the easy challenges and start playing the way I enjoy. 3 hours is far, far too much of a time requirement.
At the current price of 60,000 credits it will take you 40 hours of gameplay time to earn the right to unlock one hero or villain. That means 40 hours of saving each and every credit, no buying any crates at all, so no bonus credits from getting duplicates in crates.
The spreadsheet also includes estimates for the amount of time it will take to earn uncommon and rare cards based on the Gamespot crate opening statistics, but the drop rates have not been tested enough for me to include them there. But I do think it’s scary that it could potentially take someone over 20 hours of gameplay to earn enough Crafting Parts to make an Epic tier Star Card.
Since credits are earned via play time rather than victory, that means you’ll be grinding for a while just to earn one. Especially since that’s time actually in match, not just time running or loading. EA responded to this and other unlock-related posts on Reddit:
Our goal involves creating a compelling progression path for all of our players. There’s a lot of content at launch with even more coming via live service, and we’ll continuously adjust our progression mechanics to give players a sense of accomplishment as they explore all of Battlefront 2.
I posted this in another thread, but feel it would be good to post here as well.
Heroes earned through Credits: The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. We selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we’re looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we’ll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
Credits Earned: We’re looking at the results daily and will be continuing to tune this to ensure that players feel a meaningful sense of reward for the time they spend with Battlefront 2.
We appreciate the conversation here, and our team is working to make the best choices possible for the game and the players. We will provide more details and updates as we can
In the 12 hours that post has been up as of this writing, it has 2527 downvotes. It’ll probably have more by the time this goes live. I’d personally imagine that there’s no sense of pride in playing Star Wars: Battlefront 2 for several months in your off time just to get one character. Hell, the post immediately responding to theirs says exactly that. But, hey, what were you expecting from EA?