I haven’t read the whole thread yet or looked into the matter in much detail, but my understanding on the uproar is that it would take 40 hours of grinding in multiplayer to unlock each “hero” and there are 14 heroes, so you’re looking at needing to invest hundreds of hours to unlock characters (560 to unlock them all) behind a paywall that you might only end up playing some of them a few times as the match allows you to play these characters based on certain conditions and success within the match.
It’s an obvious ploy to push people to simply spend money instead to unlock them rather than invest so much time which many people don’t have to invest in gaming let alone one game by itself. This is after the fact of having already bought the game at AAA price ($90 in Australia for the standard addition) so it’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow.
It also makes it plain as day that the game is ‘pay 2 win’ by being able to essentilly buy these characters which give huge advantages over your regular troop character you play as when not a hero. This is a HUGE no-no in online competitive gaming and a really stupid move by EA who have apparently responded to the backlash by lowering the time needed to unlock these heroes to 10% of what it originally was, making them much more accessible to the casual gamer that spent good money to have some fun playing in the SW universe.
Myself, I never bought the first game (multiplayer only) but I was blown away by the graphical fidelity and simply how exact they got the look and sound of Star Wars right. I said to myself that if they ever make a single player game with what they have created in Battlefront 1 then I would buy it just for that - which is exactly what I’ve done and am really looking forward to playing the single player story when the game releases tomorrow.
As for the multiplayer aspect, I don’t really care about it as I’ve moved on from the battlefield type games but it’s a nice bonus if I want to play against some mates or just have a bit of random fun in the SW universe and I am glad that EA have reduced the hero unlock times as I am exactly the person that would never have time to dedicate 40hrs of online play for even just one hero, let alone the rest and I sure as hell ain’t paying them anymore money than the full AAA game price I’ve already paid.
.Val