Star Wars: Battlefront II – have you got 188 days to spare?

According to fan calculations it’d take 188 days to unlock all the content in Battlefront II, but paying for loot boxes is not a cheap alternative…

£70 for a video game is madness and put me off buying a PS5 - Reader’s Feature

It’s becoming clear that Star Wars: Battlefront II will be seen as a milestone game in the future, not for its gameplay or graphics but for the way it makes its money.

Although it’s still a £60 video game its progression system works like a free-to-play mobile game, and is based solely on loot boxes.

You get a loot box free every day, and can buy them using earned in-game currency, but it would take a very long time to unlock everything in the game by doing just that. And fan site Star Wars Gaming seems to have worked out exactly how long.




According to their calculations it would take 4,528 hours (just over 188 days) to unlock everything, assuming you earn in-game credits at a rate of 1,100 per hour.

This ignores the time required to unlock all the heroes, which has already become its own controversy – forcing EA to drop the requirements for unlocking them by 75%.

If you assume the average person only gets an hour or two to play the game each day, at best, it would take years for normal gamers to unlock everything – which is where the microtransactions come into it.

You can buy loot crates with real-money (or rather you buy a separate in-game currency with real money) and if you wanted to pay your way to unlocking everything it would cost roughly $2,100 (£1,597).

Of course, in an online shooter it’s not required to unlock absolutely everything, but anyone that does will have an advantage over you.

EA has already made a number of changes to how the system works, but it remains to be seen if they will instigate any more fundamental changes – and whether this style of monetisation will be used in future games, by them and other publishers.

Star Wars: Battlefront II launches for everyone this Friday, November 17, for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.

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