Xbox 360 Fanboy is reporting that the Battlefield: Bad Company beta has, among its currently unavailable armaments, a total of ten guns that are denoted by the curious phrase “Buy this weapon on Xbox LIVE Marketplace.”
This is rather worrying.
Typically, online shooters employ a variety of weaponry, partly to keep skirmishes diverse and allow participants to find the play style that best fits them — but often, like in famous examples Call of Duty 4 and Counter-Strike, to reward players who persevere with improved weaponry.
For some time, laying down fire with a particularly badass weapon unavailable to players right off the bat has been a testament to one’s skill or dedication — but a move like this threatens to allow those with extra cash to simply buy their way into dominance. It’s one thing to offer cosmetic microtransactions like horse armor, but quite another to let the haves prey upon the have-nots just as they do in the real world.
One of the reasons I game is to escape the petty annoyances of the class divide, and artificially grafting that horrendous trait of capitalism onto a realm that has to some degree escaped it is, in my opinion, a step in the wrong direction.
UPDATE: Game|Life blogger Earnest Cavalli claims that the game’s statistics graphs show the extra weapons have relatively the same power as those included in your purchase… but we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, as the graph pictured there only vaguely measured the weapons in terms of accuracy, rate of fire, clip size, damage and handling.
0 Comments For This Post
1 Trackbacks For This Post
July 29th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
[...] sure we have the right to ask that question” — and I welcome microtransaction schemes as long as they don’t confer an in-game advantage; but neither of these change the fact that EA seems to be abandoning its earlier position with [...]
Leave a Reply