Unlocking all of the content in Star Wars Battlefront 2 is a process that takes 4,528 hours of playtime, or alternatively cost gamers around $2,100 in microtransactions.
Electronic Arts is still struggling to fight the flurry of negative consumer reaction for Star Wars Battlefront 2, a title with plenty of otherwise positive aspects like gorgeous visuals and a brand new focus on singleplayer activities. The company found itself in hot water earlier this week when gamers discovered it would take 40 hours of in-game playtime to unlock a top-tier hero, prompting a mass of negative comments about how the studio was seemingly forcing gamers into microtransactions if they really wanted to unlock the majority of content.
In response to a consumer reaction so negative that it spawned both the most downvoted Reddit post of all time and death threats to several game developers, Electronic Arts slashed the in-game currency cost of its top-tier heroes by 75%. Somewhat sneakily, however, it also cut down the coins awarded for completing challenges, and put a cap on how many coins could be earned in a certain amount of time through single player. Now, Star Wars Gaming has done the math and figured out that if a player wants to unlock all the content in Battlefront 2, they either must pay $2,100 or spent 4,528 hours grinding away at the game.
This math assumes that players already have all of the cards unlocked, have upgraded them to the third level, and that all challenge rewards were claimed in the process of upgrading these cards. Calculating the tiered card rewards from loot crates (which have a 55% chance of level 1,40% of level 2, and 5% for level 3), the equation rounds an average card level to 1.5 with a value of 300 credits. Loot crates give an average of 2 cards, and crafting parts are assumed to have an average of 50. Thus, once players have every card in the game, a hero crate is valued at 600 credits and 50 crafting parts, with the other credits being accounted for by reducing crate cost from 2,100 to 1,600.
The game contains a total of 324 cards, and fully upgrading them all will cost a total of 155,520 crafting parts. This will require gamers to open a staggering 3,111 loot crates, and in order to rack up enough credits for this gamers will have to commit to 4,528 hours of playtime. Alternatively, these 3,111 loot crates will cost gamers about 248,880 crystals under these same starting circumstances, which comes with a cost of $2,100 under the assumption that players buy only the most cost-effective $100 crystal pack 21 times over.
Suffice to say, it’s well-neigh impossible for a completionist to unlock all the content Battlefront 2 has to offer armed with spare time alone. Of course, gamers don’t need to unlock this content in order to enjoy its multiplayer action or the singleplayer campaign, but the numbers themselves are certainly daunting to look at. Each card takes plenty of work to fully upgrade, and the snowball effect of having so many cards reveals that consumers upset about the loot crate system probably have a point – after all, these numbers are somewhat of a best case scenario and run under the assumption that players don’t get plenty of low value loot drops.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 is set to release on November 17,2017 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
