This is absolutely ridiculous. There is simply no precedent for this in $60 console games. This is several levels beyond any of the scummiest and most cynical cash grabs we've seen in console gaming up to this point.
They admitted to deliberately curbing the speed at which you can earn credits in order to make the fanciest cars hard to obtain. And they've taken it to such an extreme that it takes several hours of play in order to afford one of those pricey cars, and since you get nowhere near close to affording many of those cars by the time you finish the career, that means you're going to be grinding the same content you've already completed several times over in order to afford all the cars.
Oh, or you could buy their virtual currency instead, which they helpfully remind you of constantly.
They deliberately designed the progression of the game to be molasses slow in order to tempt you to buy virtual currency. It's F2P game design grafted into a $60 game with paid day one DLC.
Originally Posted by teiresias
Guys guys, "Sony will do the same thing!"
There was a thread a day or two ago where many people were convinced that GT6 was JUST AS BAD because they announced they were selling virtual currency as well, even though we have no idea how quickly you can earn credits in that game or how much they charge for cars or how valuable their virtual currency is.
Originally Posted by slothmoney
I'm a little unclear on this issue, Forza Horizon had car tokens, a few could be earned, but you were expected to buy them. That said, there was never an instance were I couldn't purchase a car down the road with winnings from races (online and off). Is that still the case? Or are some cars listed as "shipping with the game" but locked out because of these credits?
You can eventually purchase all the cars in FM5 without paying for virtual currency, but the rate at which you can earn the in-game credits to buy the cars normally is so ridiculously slowed down that it would take you several dozen hours of replaying races you already won in order to afford them. You could race online, but since you are less likely to finish first, that would be a slower way to get credits than just doing career races over and over.
While Forza Horizon was littered with DLC ads and enabled you to buy tokens and boosters, none of that was necessary because the game gave out credits at a fair rate for playing the game. After playing Horizon for 25 hours (mostly single player, couple hours of online, and a couple hours of challenging rivals), I had bought most of the cars I had wanted and could afford to buy a couple of the 10 or so cars that cost over a million credits.
To earn a million credits in Horizon, it would take me, near the end game, two hours at MOST. In Forza 5, it would take several times that length of time.
Originally Posted by razgriz417
I'm confused, are tokens the same as credits? And are any of these cars listed about also locked behind the $50 season pass?
You get paid credits in game for playing, just like in most sim racing games. Tokens are their virtual currency that you pay real money for.
The kicker with the Forza DLC is that once you buy a DLC pack, you still have to buy the car with credits or tokens. So if you paid for the DLC for the LaFerrari, which is a highly desirable and expensive car, you would still have to earn the credits in game to buy that car, which would take several hours of playing. Or you could buy tokens, which the game reminds you of constantly.
So if the LaFerrari cost 1 million credits, and you bought the DLC for the LaFerrari, you would have to either have 1 million credits on hand, play for the hours required to make the difference up, or pay for enough tokens to buy the LaFerrari. Yes, you would be paying them MULTIPLE TIMES in order to drive that car.
