Tuesday is upon us and with it another day of news. While today isn’t as dramatic as yesterday, it has its fair share of interesting topics.

  • Starcraft 2 went mostly free to play
  • Call of Duty: WWII delays microtransactions
  • Battlefront 2: the finale

 

Starcraft 2 is Free Now
Starcraft 2, Blizzard’s famous real-time strategy game, has gone mostly free to play. When I say mostly, its because there are a few conditions. Ranked ladder matches are granted after 10 victories in unranked or AI mode and you can only achieve level 5 or below in co-op mode. While the Wings of Liberty campaign is free, the other campaigns will cost 15 dollars. If you purchase any of the other campaigns or a war crate, then the previous restrictions are lifted. This is a nice model idea, in my opinion. This will let players get a taste of the game, and then support it how they want. for more details go to the Starcraft 2 website.

Call of Duty: WWII Delays Microtransactions
When the most recent Call of Duty game launched, it was met with a number of technical issues. This would eventually lead the developers to disable the multiplayer aspect to the Headquarters, a social zone for players to stand around outside of combat. Now they have announced that they will delay the activation of COD Points, an in-game currency used to purchase loot crates. While you can earn these points in-game, they can also be purchased with microtransactions. The studio promised on Sunday that they are working non stop in order to get things back up and running as quickly as they can. The current estimation is no sooner than November 21. My sympathies to those who are playing CoD: WWII.

EA and Star Wars Battlefront II
If you saw yesterday’s post, you saw a summary of all the drama around EA games and their newest game, Star Wars Battlefront II. I suggest reading the previous post if you haven’t, or this update won’t make as much sense.
EA has responded in 2 ways to all the criticism. The first way was by lowing the price of heroes by 75%. Less iconic heroes now cost 5,000 credits, semi-important heroes at 10,000, and the big 2 (Luke and Vader) costing 15,000 credits. While this is a vast improvement to the initial 60,000, it only validates that they could have made these prices that low from the start. Another less noble action taken by EA is the sudden disappearance of a refund button on Origin, EAs game distribution system. This is a clear effort to dissuade people from actually following through with preorder cancellations, scummy move.

 

Like usual, thanks for reading. Be sure to check back tomorrow for the latest and greatest in video game news. Have a great night, everyone.