Assassin's Creed Origins launches this Friday, October 27, and it seems like it will be launching with Microtransactions, an in-game currency bought with real-world money, and Loot Crates. There are also reports from reviewers playing the game early that, unlike other single-player games with these features such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, Origins makes no effort to hide them - and even pushes them on players.
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It's been known for a while that Loot Crates, called "Heka Chests", will be in Assassin's Creed Origins, despite the game being a single-player game and the negative backlash against these gambling boxes.
It's only now, with the game in some people's hands, that we can identify this as a problem. These Heka Chests are bought with Helix Credits, an in-game Premium Currency that can be bought with real-world money. GameStop for example has bundles of these for sale that go all the way up to $49.99, almost as much as the game itself. While Helix Credits can be earned in-game at least, this is still disturbing.
While other single-player games such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or Middle-Earth: Shadow of War have been criticised or outright condemned for featuring Loot Crates alone, they at least did not push them on gamers. We played both games and didn't even know they had microtransactions and loot crates. Assassin's Creed Origins, on the other hand, apparently advertises these microtransactions in-game and suggests that players get them to speed up their progress.
Fortunately there have been competing reports that say that actually the microtransactions in Origins can be ignored since the Helix Currency can be easily gained. Hopefully this is true, since while we can personally stand them in games we absolutely cannot them being advertised to us while we're playing. That's something the worst F2P mobile games do, not single-player full-price PC/console releases.
We'll find out together when Assassin's Creed Origins launches October 27, this Friday.
