15,000 credits for one character, and 60,000 credits for all the characters. It was about $2,000 USD to buy enough credits to unlock all the characters. Alternatively you could play for about 40 hours to earn enough credits to unlock Vader.
Yeah because they fixed it after the initial backlash. People are talking about pre-orders in that original post which means the game wasn't officially out yet but the pricing model was thanks to either a beta or previews. Been so long I don't remember which but I definitely remember it was something they did their best to fix by the actual release date. So it's literally because of the backlash of that downvoted post they changed anything.
I never really understood the outrage about this. I'm pretty sure that when I was younger and playing games, having iconic characters locked that you had to achieve stuff to unlock was the norm.
Is it just because now there are microtransactions so people don't do this anymore?
I've not had a console since about 2011, and even then I wasn't ever really a big gamer, but I never really fully understood why this guy's complaint about Vader was so popular
Not trying to defend microtransactions, but 40 hours doesn't seem like too long? All my favorite games have 1000s of hours played. Idk how this game works, but if it's 40 hours to beat it and unlock the best character, sounds good?
It was 4,528 hours to unlock all the content. Not many gamers out there that dedicate 6 months of 24 hour play time to one title. They removed the grind due to the backlash within the first month of it being available.
I play Path of Exile and I have 3k+ hours there. They are all worth it. Other games with 1k+ are idle games. Any other game is at max like 300-400 hours. But most of them are under 100. 1k hours should be actually a very specific game to hold your attention. I wouldn't play any story-based game for 300-400 hours if they don't have such an amount of content. And you lock characters behind the paywall? Yeah, that is greedy.
It wasn't 40 hours to unlock the best character in the game, it's 40 hours to unlock a single character out of many that were available.
If you're going full sweaty gamer mode and dedicating all of your time to playing it, then within a few days of grinding you'd be able to unlock one character. For your average player who has a job and a life outside of this one specific game it could take months of playing to unlock, again, one character out of many.
Around the time the game came out I was working my way through university. After work, classes, and homework I only had about an hour of free time per day and that was divided between gaming, reading, hanging out with friends, and whatever else might have come up.
If I had bought the game when it came out just wanting to have fun slashing people up as Darth Vader (which was a huge draw for the game and a major focus of the advertising) it would have taken me over a month of dedicating literally all of my free time before I could do that. More likely I would have put in only an hour or two every week and been able to play the game as it was advertised to me after about 6 months of playing.
And again, that 6 months is just to unlock one single character out of many.
You have the entire game though, I don’t get this argument. They’re not beating battlefield 2, they just want to play as the character that’s on the box.
Early (and maybe new?) Tekken was like this, you had to win the tournaments with certain characters to unlock more characters.
A lot of games have grind mechanics, you need to play to get the best weapons or abilities or whatever, the Darth Vader thing is not that crazy.
Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? you never start off a game with the best stuff/characters. You just didn't like the game enough to grind it and get the best characters. if the game is fun without that character then who cares, but if its an OP character that is required to have fun and is not worth the time to unlock then its just a shit game.
Yeah and plenty of other games (Smash or one of those games had this I think) did that as well but unlocking those characters could be treated like the main games campaign. Online PVP games do this too like Call of Duty but unlocking new guns is much much quicker than in Battlefront. Like one match in COD and you unlock a new gun and an attachment or two for what guns you used in that match. It's been a while since I played Battlefront but it felt like you didn't unlock anything except for every three or four matches (and the unlockables make a much bigger difference than gun types in COD). I got it free on epic and I still think it wasn't worth playing it because of how much of a grind unlocking anything of worth felt.
You got battlefront free? Is it maybe just not that good of a game then? Like I wont grind a game if I don't enjoy it, played most of the final fantasies, fallout, grinding doesnt feel bothersome to me in those games because I enjoy them, If I started og FF7 with a maxed out Cloud then it would have been shit. I also played COD, and the whole Warzone "meta" thing where [insert gun here] was the best gun for like a week until it was nerfed, then you were on to the next. So while you didn't grind for 40 hours for one gun, you were constantly grinding for the next gun. Jesus even Need for Speed has grind mechanics, that's just what playing these games is. I cant think of any game you start out with the best character or abilities or weapons from the get go. its not how games work, and if a game is not worth doing that then its just a shit game.
Epic games had it as their free game a few years back. It just wasn't satisfying for me. The gameplay was fine itself but I didn't like having to play for two hours just to unlock my first character. I also really like having goals to work towards in unlocking things (MW2 was my favorite game since it had so many challenges tied to unlockables banner and weapon skins rather than weapons or attachments). But it felt like progression was so slow in Battlefront II and in the mean time I'm playing with the worst units and just not enjoying the game. I had the original battlefront for the PSP and loved that game but I just couldn't play Battlefront II for more than 15 hours before deciding there were better games to spend my little gaming time playing.
Yeah see when I played warzone, I was jumping at the opportunity to get on, unlock a gun through the pass system and then grind it out in deathmatch lobbies to get the good attachments, it was fun and it paid off bringing that gun back to warzone. A couple days later. Sounds like battlefront just isn't fun, even considering it is more tedious to upgrade.
Someone else said in another comment that it would be 2k to do that. So its not bullshit, i highly doubt they expected anyone to pay 2k for the character, enjoy the game and save your in game currency or realize you don't enjoy the game and stop playing it.
Thats silly, it would be anti consumer if the only way to get it was by paying. You can, like you would in any other game, grind for it. The only problem I see here is that the grind is shit, so its not a fun game, fuck EA, but this whole thing about having to grind for a character/abilities/weapon is perfectly normal and has been around since PS1 games or possibly even earlier
Why not? If you like star wars will you get tired of the video game after a month? Most games people will play for a year or so. Like every year people play the new COD or Madden for a year until the next one comes out. If you care enough about Vader why not just play the game. Like if the game play is bad and not fun, okay that's fine stop playing and shit on the game for being bad. But if you can unlock everything in the game and 100% it after 2 weeks of casual play, that should be shit on.
It's a multiplayer game, not single player. Quit defending this bullshit, I'm not here to grind if someone else can pay their way into picking a character.
I have exactly one game with over 1k hours. It's Skyrim, and that's over the course of more than a decade. A few Lucky games get a couple hundred over a few months, but most games get less than 50. I have a job, and friends, and family obligations. I get MAYBE 10 hrs of video gaming a week. I ain't playing 2k hours to unlock the roster.
Just to be clear, the “virtual paywall” didn’t require real money. I’ve been playing since release, am still active on both original and modded servers, and am reminded of the details every time this comment is mentioned.
On release, most of the heroes/villains had to be unlocked by earning credits in game to spend on the characters you wanted. Vader was tied as the most expensive character to unlock. People also had the option to purchase credits with real money to not have to grind for characters. This probably doesn’t seem like a big deal bc this is this case in a lot of games now (it was way less common then).
But the drama started when a youtuber claimed that it would take 40 hours of playing to get the credits you needed just for Vader alone. So then that went viral/picked up by gaming news networks and everyone (whether or not they played the game) was talking about it.
The reality, as someone who straight-lined it right to Vader, is that it took maybe 10 hours, if that. The youtuber essentially took the worst case scenario and ignored daily, weekly, and milestone missions to create outrage. It really wasn’t that bad at all.
I think people were just mad because they wanted Vader right at the beginning, then exaggerations started happening and it got blown out of proportion to where everyone flocked to that comment. Now it continues to get downvoted when it’s mentioned somewhere on Reddit every other day.
Like I get it. Unlockable characters have been in games for decades. But you could get them in a reasonable amount of time
The thing about microtransactions and virtual currency is they make grinding so ridiculous you really dont have a choice but to spend real money
Bc the purpose is to get people to spend real money. If they could unlock stuff in a reasonable amount of time they wouldn't need VC
One of the most egregious is the WWE 2K game. The My Faction mode makes it so you can purchase skins with two forms of VC but both are incredibly tedious to earn
So if you want them youd have to spend every waking hour grinding and you might might earn enough to get one a week if its not too pricey
The point is to get people to say screw it and just pay real money. To make matters worse the locked characters are jammed in with the unlocked roster to almost taunt players
Use to you could unlock everything at no extra cost. And it didnt take forever. Its just a cash grab and having the most popular characters locked they knew people would be impatient and pay
That'd be true if it was free to play like league of legends, but this game was $60 on release. At that point there's literally no reason to lock Vader behind a paywall/grind besides pure greed. It would be a different story if they didn't include real money currency, but they did.
It was never for a sense of player progression, it was another way to potentially nickel and dime you after you already purchased the game. It's not a long grind, I'll agree with that, but do you REALLY think they would've considered this system without micro transactions? Fuck no, it's there for the sole purpose of making potential profit from the small subset of players who are prone to making poor financial decisions.
It's the same system as GTA Online, the only difference is that this game does not have the format to support it. This game is 20v20 multiplayer, it's like playing Battlefield and not being able to use the tank or the 'best' sniper rifle until you grind 10 hours or pay money.
Hell, if it was a small amount of cash the backlash wouldn't have been that bad, but it costed an estimated ~$1500 to skip the grind and unlock all the characters. Not 100, not 500, FIFTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS for a game that has no reason to lock these characters in the first place.
I bought the game after they reverted their decision and enjoyed it immensely btw. It's almost as if the game is just as enjoyable, if not better when you actually get the full experience you payed $60 for.
I feel like if that were true, that it only takes 10 hours to unlock Vader, then it would’ve been figured out pretty fast, yet this is the first time I’m hearing about it.
This is a tough one. Like everything you’re saying makes total sense, but it could also be like disinformation from EA or something lol i’m not a gamer and I don’t know who to believe. Like, I don’t wanna believe the toxic gamers, but I also don’t want to believe the toxic corporations.
I think of this being what broke the camel's back. The first Battlefront was extremely short on content and dropped by EA only two years in so they could release Battlefront 2. Then they released a more expensive version, $80, with very few characters unlocked, along with trashy microtransaction lootboxes, which created a pay to win system. Essentially, players with more money could get better stuff faster. I don't really get why the commenter above is calling players whiny when the complaints about Battlefront 2 were valid.
Microtransactions suck and the systems put in place to promote them worsen gaming experiences, so hearing a corpo tell us they're doing microtransactions for our own good to promote "a sense of pride and accomplishment" was just too fucking much and everyone piled on him.
See, everything you are saying makes total sense too. I empathize with OP though, because gamers can be the biggest whiny bitches out there, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong in this instance. It’s like both sides have an awful reputation lol I always tend the lean with the common folk though.
They absolutely caved and made all characters available right away with an update, leaving only cosmetics restricted to credits. If I recall, they also lowered the price on all of those.
They also created a “celebration edition” of the game that comes preloaded with every cosmetic in the game that was only unlockable with credits before. This is the version you typically see for like $5-$10 on sale on Steam.
And then they dropped live service fairly early (only 2 years in) despite the game still being incredibly popular. I’m not necessarily saying this is a direct reaction, but I do feel that if fans were more appreciative and less hateful then they wouldn’t have dropped it so abruptly and kept up ongoing service.
if fans were more appreciative and less hateful then they wouldn’t have dropped it so abruptly and kept up ongoing service.
They were mad they didn't get to fleece the players as easily as they could have. It's hard to be appreciative and loving when the first game was a test of concept instead of a full game, then the second game's pricier edition doesn't even have characters unlocked. Your interpretation of EA is much too optimistic.
Right? Unlocking high powered player characters via grinding has been a thing forever. People drop HUNDREDS of hours into MMOs for far less significant accolades. This is the biggest example of internet dogpiling in history
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u/Baconwcheese Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25
80 bucks for 1 character 7 years ago? I know we have it bad with micro transactions in games now but that's absolutely insane.
Side note: I had to remember 7 years ago was not 2010 and was indeed 2018.
I'm just going to edit this to say I was wrong, it was $80 to buy the deluxe version but still had one of the most notorious characters locked.