With 2015’s Call of Duty: Black Ops III offering loot boxes in their Black Market shop, players have been extended the opportunity to purchase ‘CoD Points’ that can be used on loot boxes, and that kind of bugs me. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I’ve really taken notice of all the franchises injecting ‘optional’ microtransactions by way of loot crates and boxes into multiplayer-heavy games as a means of monetizing the game a little bit further I never felt like a full-ticket ($70-80 CAD) game was trying to squeeze me for every penny in my wallet, and I don’t recall ever sinking money into these packs the way I did that one time for Mass Effect. Dragon Age: Inquisition was another that caught my eye (though the multiplayer didn’t grasp me quite the way that ME3 did), and the ‘battlepacks’ offered in Battlefield 4 for a variety of purposes felt like a nice addition to things that could typically be earned through normal gameplay. I gobbled it up, equated the $10 in premium packs to what I’d have happily paid for DLC, and made on my merry way.Ī little ways down the line, more games began offering loot boxes as part of their progression system. At the time, Bioware was scrambling about to regain some high ground after the controversy surrounding the game’s ending, and began releasing modest, but substantial, multiplayer expansions for free. So, a few premium packs later ($3 each), I fell right back in-step with my friends, fighting to push back the Reapers and Cerberus in their invasion of Citadel Space. ![]() They were regularly pushing upper-difficulty missions (Gold / Platinum tier), and my lower-grade equipment simply wasn’t cutting it. I spent ~$10 on Xbox Points (back when there was a dollars-to-points conversion) so that I could buy a few premium packs to catch up with some friends who had spent a whole weekend gaming without me. The whole process was an exercise in a risk-vs-reward game of chance, but one that felt pretty safe considering I was only spending currency earned in-game, not real-world money. I was hooked rather quickly, I confess, as I’d spent a significant portion of my childhood cracking open booster packs of both Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering cards. That cash could then be saved or spent on loot boxes available in a handful of tiers the more expensive, the better chance for securing rare and/or high-powered gear for your characters. The multiplayer was a new-to-me take on ‘competitive co-op’ with credits (money) being earned for the team’s performance score at the end of a round. ![]() My first foray into (video) gaming with loot boxes was with Mass Effect 3 – another title published by EA, curiously enough – released in the spring of 2012. There was something new, unexpected, and slightly gamble-y about it at its core, however, it was simply a fresh gameplay mechanic that drove my multiplayer experience to a new level. Amid the latest turmoil regarding Electronic Arts‘ microtransactions and loot crates in the full-price Star Wars Battlefront II, I wanted to take a minute to look back on something that I’ll freely admit – I used to love loot boxes in my games.
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