Quick Look: Star Wars Battlefront II

I want to meet the person who's paying any substantial amount of money for loot crates in this game. Especially early on. The idea that Dan would be up against fully kitted people early on in play is crazy to me, who buys a game and immediately buys loot crates!?! WHYYYYYYY

If you want to buy loot crates after putting a bunch of time in a game you have come to love, go for it. I bought a couple crates in battlegrounds after 100 hours of play, but to buy them outright!?

@mikemcn: Wealthy people have more money than time. Some of them still enjoy playing games. Michael Pachter has admitted to spending lots of money on Candy Crush (or maybe it was some other mobile game).

That’s fine, the problem is when games are designed in ways where they end up being not fun unless you spend money. That’s why no one has issues with loot crates when the contents are all cosmetic (like PUBG).

@mikemcn: I'm very curious who has shelled out for crates in Shadow of War. Despite them being in the game I've enjoyed it and haven't found the need to buy them at all (yet). I'm sure SOMEONE has; I just have a suspicion it's a very low percentage of those who bought the game.

Vinny at 38 minutes just describes battlefront 2, a great goddamn game, if they had just redone all the assets of that game and put it out for 60 they would have made a great profit. They couldn't even manage that.

@thepotatoman: You never actually address the main points I raise. Take the random drops out of it, lets just imagine each crate gives the standard average of 50 Crafting parts (so 6 cards per 5 boxes). Now we look at the Hero crates, which cost 2,200 credits. You get 1,000 credits per rank up, and about 200 credits per match (give or take). If it takes 5 matches to level up, you're getting 1 new, guaranteed skill/ability unlock per "level up" of 5 matches, even after we remove all achievement bonuses. That's not so bad, right?

Now of course early on you're better off opening up Trooper crates for twice the price since you consider each bonus Trooper card you get to be helpful in leveling up your Card level, and sure you can get dupes (and the 200 credit refund is paltry), but who cares? I love playing Heavy and had 3 slots unlocked for it within 3-4 hours of play and all the skills I wanted (Ion Turret, Supercharge Sentry and the "health regen starts faster" perk). Sure I can keep grinding to knock 2 seconds off my Sentry cooldown, but my Heavy's skills are effectively maxed out for 95% of the situations I'll find myself in.

Remember too that completing specific achievements for classes (kills with weapon types, sentry guns, etc) give special crates with guaranteed rank 2/3 skill cards.

Also, how can you say that you can get lootboxes not be the equivalent of a "level-up" when Crafting Parts, the main tool of guaranteed progression, always drop? Even if 3 of the cards in a Lootbox are a dupe, you get enough Parts to unlock a Trooper or Starfighter card.

And yes, it is hard to max out Troopers AND unlock every hero, although a big part of that probably comes from people spending lots of credits on Trooper crates (and getting skills for a Trooper class they will never use) instead of using credits on Hero/Starfighter crates, using the Crafting Parts to unlock desired skills, and then saving up credits to buy Heroes instead of throwing credits away on Trooper crates on a 1% chance of a rank 3 card (which Dan seems to do).

But, so what? It's safe to assume that for 95% of a match (and, in many cases, 100% of a match) you will not have the Battlepoints to use or someone will have already spawned as an unlockable hero, right? Expecting to have all the heroes unlocked AND have Troopers maxed out literally a few days after the games release is sort of silly, I think.

2 minutes into watching this my choice to not buy this is completely validated. Wow. Garbage.

Man, the second new Battlefront that I don't get to play. It's very disappointing. Please don't screw up a third one.

@gormac: Also, I say they do the Arkham Knight thing and give refunds to everyone, stop all sales, fix it, and try again.

Good luck with that. Arkham Knight was unplayable on PC - they basically had to refund people. This game just has a shitty progression and loot box system.

@vinny I didn't see anyone else mention it, and apologies if you've clarified this or been corrected about it elsewhere, but Starkiller Base is almost definitely not named after the character in Force Unleashed, but rather after Luke Skywalker's original surname of Starkiller in early screenplay drafts for the original film. Of course, the Force Unleashed character is likely named after the same reference.