'Star Wars: Battlefront II' In-Game Purchases Stopped By EA After Players' Feedback

“Star Wars: Battlefront II” has been a center of controversy for long. Electronic Arts Corporation, its parent company has finally put the issues around in-game purchases in the game to rest in a last-minute reversal before the game’s launch.

The company has shut off in-game purchases for the game.

In-game purchases have been a part of controversy around the game’s Loot boxes — while players can buy new heroes, equipment, and vehicles by earning credits within the game, they can also buy more crates with “crystals” sold for real-world money. This basically encouraged players to pay, rather than play to win.

The company has finally shut off the feature, but only temporarily.

“We hear you loud and clear, so we’re turning off all in-game purchases. We will now spend more time listening, adjusting, balancing and tuning. This means that the option to purchase crystals in the game is now offline, and all progression will be earned through gameplay. The ability to purchase crystals in-game will become available at a later date, only after we’ve made changes to the game. We’ll share more details as we work through this,” Oskar Gabrielson, general manager of Electronic Arts Digital Illusions CE division stated in an official post on EA’s website.

“Star Wars: Battlefront II” was expected to fix the issues with the first “Battlefront” game.

However, it seems, in an effort to enhance the game’s features, it became rather egregious for players, especially with the Loot Box system. Fans who received special early editions of the game revolted at the crystals feature, since unlocking an iconic character like Darth Vader in the game could take dozens of hours of gameplay and simply be able to buy it ruined the experience for them, especially in multi-player setups.

To remedy this, EA had reduced the number of credits required to unlock characters, but it seems that that was not enough, since players kept ranting about it in online forums and on Reddit.

However, since EA hasn’t let go of the crystals feature in the game altogether, it seems they will be back at a later date, after the company balances and tunes the game. EA is expected to give an ear to player feedback and chart its course accordingly, once the game is launched.

Issues with the game had spurned the most downvoted comment ever on Reddit when the EA community Team Reddit account responded to a player who asked “Seriously? I paid $80 to have Vader locked?” The comment has 6,76,000 downvotes at the time of writing and got more than half of these in the first 24 hours after the comment was posted.

It even inspired a CNN story titled “The new Star Wars video game is under attack.”

“Star Wars: Battlefront II” will be released on Friday and is expected to go live in a few hours from the time of writing.​