Editorial: When to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, and when to loot box ‘em

When to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, and when to loot box ‘em

          Paying money for a little bit of extra stuff has been in gaming for years now, and the most popular example recently has been the idea of the loot box. If you’ve never encountered one (consider yourself lucky), they basically work as a way to earn yourself some cosmetics, in-game cash, and various other stuff.

          The trick is that it’s completely random what you’ll get. Like opening packs for collectible card games back in the day, you might get doubles of stuff you’ve seen dozens of times before, or you might win the lottery and find a box jam packed with rare gear. It’s entirely up to the computer. Overwatch is one of the more notable games to have used this system to dole out cosmetic items, previously in the past employing some shady tactics to coax players into handing over money to pay more. In the first Summer Games event one year ago, all the exclusive skins couldn’t be purchased with in-game cash, instead only being available through loot boxes. Thankfully, the outcry among fans was so massive that this policy was reversed when the next event arrived a few months later.

          But that hasn’t stopped other developers from sticking these glorified slot machines everywhere. Enter Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the upcoming sequel to the critical and commercial darling 2014’s Shadow of Mordor. This sequel has been in quite the hot spot recently after Warner Bros. announced they were turning Lord of the Rings’ famous spider Shelob into a stereotypical looking hot video game sorceress, but that’s a story for another day. To paraphrase Gandalf, while the game was already in the frying pan from this controversy, they were quickly launched into the fire when publisher Warner Bros. announced that loot boxes would become an integral part of the Shadow of War experience.

          The previous game sold itself almost entirely on the special “Nemesis system”, a way for orcs and uruks you’ve previously defeated to return later on with new battle scars and a chip on their shoulder. Shadow of War enhances on this much-lauded system by flipping it on its head in a way: you can now take the orcs you find through the nemesis system and switch them over to your side, creating an orc army at your fingertips.

          Of course, Warner Brothers looked at all those orcs you’re going to have to upgrade and thought “Now there’s a way we can milk these gamers dry!”

          Because no money will ever be enough money for these publishers, Shadow of War will be including a “market” where players can fork over real-world cash to buy stuff like EXP boosts and loot boxes that include special weapons and even entirely new orcs for your army.

          This is a problem on so many levels. When it comes to the loot box insanity most games have justification for them. Overwatch has exclusively cosmetic items in their boxes, abstaining from any way the players can use their bank account to improve at the game. Free-to-play games like Hearthstone usually get the okay for extra microtransactions because, well, you paid no money for them up front. The developers have to make back the cost of development somehow.

          But Shadow of War is neither of those. This is a triple-A game that’ll almost certainly cost upwards of $70 at launch with extra ways to spend money later on. Looking at what the microtransactions are in this game, you’re basically paying for cheat codes that used to be free. The game is also an entirely singleplayer experience, so there’s no extra advantage you’d get by paying money except to make the campaign easier for you.

          There’s always the argument of “don’t like it, don’t buy it”, but this really concerns me about what other developers will use this tactic in their exclusively singleplayer games. I’ve no doubt that the Terrible Trio of EA, Ubisoft and Bethesda are chomping at the bit to insert microtransactions into their next game, and who’s to say that Sony or Microsoft won’t start forcing them into their second-party games as well.

          Let me just leave you with this. Earlier this year Horizon: Zero Dawn proved to everybody that a tremendous singleplayer game can launch with no Day 1 DLC or microtransactions and still be a critical and commercial success. I think it’s about time everyone else followed Guerilla Games’ example instead of Warner Bros.

Song of the Week

          Asgore - Undertale