It takes around 40 hours to unlock hero in Star Wars: Battlefront 2; EA responds to loot box backlash

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 received plenty of negative feedback from the gaming community during its beta phase over the implementation of loot boxes in the game. At the time of the beta, loot boxes were tied to progression which made players feel as though they were forced to buy into microtransactions.

EA and DICE changed the loot box system after the beta to lighten the ties between loot boxes and progression. Unfortunately, the EA Access 10-hour trial has revealed that the changes haven't relieved the microtransaction purchase pressures.

According to some fine math done by Redditors, it takes around 40 hours of gameplay to earn enough credits through online matches to unlock one 60,000 credit hero. To unlock every hero, a player would need to grind out over 170 hours of gameplay to unlock all of the heroes (260K credits needed to unlock them all).

Completing all of the challenges in the game will earn you 32,400 credits – which is enough to unlock Iden (20K credits), but not enough for Chewbacca, Leia, or Palpatine (40K each), and definitely not enough for Darth Vader or Luke (60K each).

According to Redditor TheHarryPotato, the breakdown looks like this:

• You get a total of 1,275 Crafting Parts by completing all Challenges in the game. This, is ALMOST enough for you to craft 3 Star Cards from Rare to Epic (a cost of 480 Crafting Parts)
• You get a total of 1,035 Crystals by completing all Challenges in the game. This is enough Crystals to get you just over 5 Trooper Crates.
• You get a total of 23 Crates by completing all Challenges in the game. Now these range from Veteran Class Crates to Crates that give you Uncommon versions of specific Star Cards after you complete a Challenge for them. We don't have enough info on these crates to know how many Credits or Crafting Parts are inside of them at the moment. But I am more than happy to add that info to this spreadsheet once we have it all verified on the hopes that it isn't randomized.

It's noted that some of the challenges can take considerable gameplay time, which makes the pressure to purchase credits with real-money even more enticing, as everything in the game would take you a ton of gameplay to earn enough to get the items you want.

EA has responded to the controversy on Reddit with the following post, saying that EA is looking to make "compelling progression" and support it with their planned content.

Our goal involves creating a compelling progression path for all of our players. There's a lot of content at launch with even more coming via live service, and we'll continuously adjust our progression mechanics to give players a sense of accomplishment as they explore all of Battlefront 2.

I posted this in another thread, but feel it would be good to post here as well.

Heroes earned through Credits: The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. We selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

Credits Earned: We're looking at the results daily and will be continuing to tune this to ensure that players feel a meaningful sense of reward for the time they spend with Battlefront 2.

We appreciate the conversation here, and our team is working to make the best choices possible for the game and the players. We will provide more details and updates as we can

The same account went on to say that the Star Wars Battlefront 2 team is "working to bring changes" that they "can" as soon as possible.