Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint is available to play now for everyone who purchased the ultimate edition, and those players are quickly finding out the game has microtransactions for just about everything. Although developer Ubisoft has previously stated they wanted Breakpoint to revolutionize the shooter genre, early looks at the title have seen it bearing many marked similarities to Ubisoft’s other microtransaction-riddled series Assassin’s Creed.
The decline of single-player DLC and rise of the “games as a service” model has led to many changes in the way games are marketed and produced over the past few years, one such result being the fact that this new Ghost Recon game is always online, similar to other Tom Clancy-brand titles The Division and Rainbow Six Siege. While multiple countries and governments have yet to settle their debates over the legality of microtransactions and loot boxes, the continued appearance of free-to-play-modeled storefronts in fully-priced titles has begun to irritate fans.
Almost-infinite Ghost Recon Breakpoint contains a lot of microtransactions at often ridiculously high prices, and they’re not just cosmetic items either. Guns, blueprints, cars, helicopters, and more can be found in the in-game storefront, as well as crafting items and packs of the game’s fictional currency, Skell Credits. Players can trade Skell Credits at shops throughout the world of Breakpoint to acquire weapons and equipment but they are useless here, and instead a player must purchase Ghost Coins with real world money. The cost and amount of these Ghost Coin packs are shown below.
Basic gun blueprints and barrel attachments like muzzle breaks and flash hiders cost 300 Ghost Coins. Tattoos cost 600. Vehicles like armored cars and helicopters can range anywhere from 940 to 2200. Magazines, scopes, rail attachments, blueprints for a gun that a player already has in their inventory, all of them are available to purchase for real money at the click of a button. While most, if not all, of these items can be found during normal gameplay, the obscure nature of the game’s design and level gating of the player make it seem like Ubisoft expects people to take the easy way out instead of actually playing the game, emphasized by the section of the storefront marked “Time Savers” which allows players to simply purchase gun upgrades instead of earning them.
This isn’t the first time Ubisoft has been accused of seemingly watering down a title’s content in order to squeeze more money out of players, but the sheer number and prices of purchasable items in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint would be comical if it wasn’t so disgusting. While some players may be able to look past these inclusions and ignore them many others can’t, and those people may feel as if they are being cheated out of content. After already spending over $60 on a brand-new game, after all, no one wants to pay another $20 just so they can get an arm tattoo and a helicopter.
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