What do you do when you have a Assassin’s Creed game, including the option for your customers to pay $ 10 to level up faster, attract all kinds of negative reactions – many of them suspicious, wary – and then a new one Assassin’s Creed two years later? Launch again with that controversial paid booster? Not quite. If you’re publisher Ubisoft, drop your $ 10 XP booster first (hooray!), And add it a month after release (hmmm).
Yesterday, Assassin’s Creed ValhallaThe online store saw the addition of two premium boosters. For $ 10, players can permanently increase their character’s experience points by 50%. They can pay an additional $ 10 to do the same for the amount of in-game currency they earn, or they can buy a $ 15 bundle that allows them to do both.
Earn XP in Valhalla allows players to earn points that they can spend on improving their character’s offensive and defensive stats, as well as perks that make their character more powerful.
Two years ago, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey‘s designers denied that the boosters affected the design of their game, saying that they did not reduce the speed at which your character grew stronger to get people to buy the booster.
Today a Ubisoft representative said the same about it ValhallaBooster from: “The XP boosters did not affect the design of the game.”
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That is plausible Walhalla‘s designers calculated the rate at which characters would improve in the game without regard to paid boosters. Character development in Valhalla is constant as players climb hundreds of levels in quest after quest.
It was also plausible for that Odyssey, because it was possible for players to comfortably improve their character without paying for boosters by playing the game with an omnivorous appetite for main missions and side missions. As players focused more on main missions, the power climb was much more difficult.
Odyssey‘s developers had to at least deal with the appearance of a possibly delayed progressionbecause that $ 10 booster went on sale at the same time as the $ 60 game. Who could rule out the idea completely that the game was sold with hidden costs, such as a supposedly free mobile game that moves too slowly unless you pay?
Last spring, Kotaku asked the creative director of Valhalla about the potential of an XP booster. H.He dodged, saying he and the team had rethought progress in the next game to avoid players feeling that areas they wanted to explore were inaccessible to them. Then came the launch and no booster. Lesson learned?
Well, it looks like some kind of lesson has been learned. Another major publisher, Activision, has been there regularly add microtransactions to Duty games after release, a thing of the past when their games are revisedWed. Valhalla launched with some microtransactions – for special outfits and handy cards – but those infamous boosters have been held back until now.
The fact that people happily went through it Valhalla for a month supports the idea that the game is not designed to make people feel like they have a XP booster. There have not been many complaints that the game is too difficult to get through, that it leaves its player character too weak. The possible complaint is that there is so much to do in the world that the game may be too big, which is a different kind of problem.
The presence of a microtransaction is nevertheless always a cause for wonder. They arouse suspicion even when it may not be justified and in that regard the creators of a game are doing a disservice that should be part of the equation, in addition to the convenience it can bring richer players and the profit it will bring to the company . Is it worth it?