I don’t find it nearly as objectionable as you do, that progress should be tied to actual multiplayer with at least one other live human being.
Also, note that in battlefront 2 you can earn a bunch of credits and crates and what-not from completing the sp campaign, the single player arcade challenges, and so on.
Says the crusader guy who spent $300 on loot crates.
Geez what’s with all the hate for Bossk? This is an outrage! I always kinda liked him as a kid. :)
He got quite the expanded role in the cartoons. But I would have preferred IGN-88. ;)
I spent more than $500 on “loot crates” in PvZ: GW2 as well. And then I was crowned champion of the world.
Of course you don’t, because that’s how you play the game! :)
But I’m curious whether it matters to you one way or the other? For instance, would you find it objectionable if I played single-player against the AI for an hour, while you played multiplayer with other humans for an hour, and we each earned the same amount of credits?
-Tom
It depends on the game, I think. For a goofy not-serious mostly kids game like PvZ: GW 2 it shouldn’t matter.
Theoretically, they could bifurcate your progression, so you could gain unlimited unlocks via arcade/solo play, but those unlocks could not be taken into multiplayer. Complex and probably not worth it, but it would work. I tend to agree in theory that in a game focused on multiplayer competition, progress should come mostly from, well, multiplayer competition. But it gets sticky when you have both solo and multiplayer rolled into one game with the same progression system.
For me, I can take a mobile-style progression system, for mobile pricing, or a traditional progression system, for traditional pricing. What I choke on is mobile progression for traditional prices.
No, no, no. You are quite right. No bad here.
I think it works as it does because all the heroes are unlocked at the start and you can set the AI difficulty to give you quite a scoring advantage over playing the real game.
And obviously they’re trying to push you into playing some multiplayer, which is the lifeblood of the game’s longevity.
I guess the alternative would be to unlock all the cards as well as the heroes, and pay out zero credits.
Gosh, if only there were some way to prorate rewards based on game settings.
That just further drives players into two camps. It makes no sense. You want to encourage players to experience as much as the game has to offer, not balkanize them into separate unrelated groups.
Why? If you can buy progression, why not let players play progression against bots?
This especially punches a hole in wumpus’ argument that you should be able to buy gems to progress, but you shouldn’t be able to progress by playing single-player. What’s the difference? If I can advance by paying real-world money, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to advance by playing against bots, or with splitscreen against my friend. If you want a pure multiplayer game, fine. But what’s clearly going on here is that EA wants your money instead of your time. It’s 100% a business decision and it stinks.
-Tom
You can min-max and game the shit out of crappy single player AI. I would say it can be done reliably and easily to farm whatever crap you need ad infinitum, probably easy to script, too. But doing that against real human multiplayer intelligence and multiplayer countermeasures? Good fucking luck.
And? …
It’s just not fair to those who paid hundreds of dollars to get that stuff!
You know what else can be done reliably and easily? Charging a credit card. Why is that okay with you but playing “crappy single-player AI” isn’t?
-Tom
really you’re sounding like a terrible apologist
I would say de facto requiring people to play “real” multiplayer to advance is rather essential for a game that builds all its long term value out of a multiplayer community.
Nobody could argue, at least not with a straight face, that PvZ GW2 was any kind of game that derived its long term value from the multiplayer community.
But Battlefront 2 doesn’t build all it’s long term value on this. It has a single player campaign with more coming, and co op play modes, and single player progression.
The online multiplayer part is literally only a third of the game.