Halo 5 microtransaction pricing revealed
All of the content for Halo 5: Guardians' new REQ system can be earned traditionally through gameplay. But for players who'd like to get going faster, you can pay real-world money for the convenience. Developer 343 Industries revealed pricing details for the game's various REQ Packs and talked more about how they work in a recent blog post.Halo 5 REQ Pack and Microtransaction Price Details
All of the content for Halo 5: Guardians’ new REQ system can be earned traditionally through gameplay. But for players who’d like to get going faster, you can pay real-world money for the convenience. Developer 343 Industries revealed pricing details for the game’s various REQ Packs and talked more about how they work in a recent blog post.
Halo 5 REQ Pack and Microtransaction Price Details
Bronze:
In-game cost: 1250 RP
Real world cost: unknown
Silver:
In-game cost: 5000 RP
Real world cost: $2
Gold:
In-game cost: 10,000 RP
Real world cost: $3
343 explained that in-game pricing has been set so that players can afford at least one REQ Pack for every other game they play. Everyone starts with 7500 RP, and players can expect to earn around 2000 RP for every Warzone game played, meaning Silver or Gold status will be easily achieved.
In addition to these three REQ Packs, Microsoft will offer a Warzone REQ Bundle, which comes with two Premium packs every week for seven weeks (totaling 14 packs). This bundle is included with the Halo 5 premium bundles, or can be purchased separately for $25.
Not all of Halo 5’s microtransaction revenue for is going to 343 either, a portion of the proceeds of all REQ Packs will be added to the Halo World Championship prize pool.
In a recent interview with Gamespot, 343’s design director Kevin Franklin spoke about Halo 5’s microtransactions.
“Everything you can get in the REQ system, you can earn whether you spend money or not,” said Franklin. “There’s no crazy special items that are only going to be reserved for people who spend a lot more money. Also, you get a lot of rewards whether you’re playing Arena or Warzone, so you’re always going to have a ton of stuff that you’ll be able to use. The biggest thing for us the moment we started even talking about this system was that the game has to be balanced. At the end of the day, it’s a multiplayer game. It’s not a spend-more-to-win game. We wanted to make sure that if you spend a whole ton of money, and you thought you could get five scorpions just because you spent more money, it’s not going to work. You’re still going to have to earn the right to call these scorpions into the battlefield.”
“So we have a mid-session progression loop, which any MOBA player will be familiar with. You have to level your character up in-game, every game, by killing enemies, going after A.I., and contributing to your team. Then you’ll unlock the ability to use these cards. So if you have ten scorpions, you can’t just call in ten scorpions. You actually have an energy system, and that levelling system that will gate you and keep the end-game balanced. And that was really huge–we’re multiplayer designers, we can’t just make a really unbalanced game. It just wouldn’t feel Halo.”
Halo 5: Guardians launches on October 27th exclusively for Xbox One.