7 TERRIBLE Video Games That Made The Industry Better

6. Battlefront 2 - The End Of Predatory Microtransactions

It took a LONG time for microtransactions to hit absolute rock bottom.

You had a practice where game makers of various roles realised they could insert microtransactions into almost any part of a game, and someone out there would pay.

Skins and cosmetics? For the most part, especially if they're in a free game, cool.

Blind boxes that may or may not have the item you need? Less cool. Annoying, in fact.

Straight-up grind-fests where the game is purposefully designed to waste your time until you "give in" and buy the solution instead? That was the tipping point.

Ubisoft's For Honor was one of the first titles with an insidious grind at heart, promptly taken to task by its fanbase. Middle-Earth: Shadow of War was another, as the endgame became entirely reliant on "orc loot boxes" to actually finish.

Then Battlefront 2 came along - all of these in 2017, by the way - and we'd had enough. Simply due to the predatory nature of paying to remove a game's grind, paired with none-other than the all-ages Star Wars branding, EA's latest was labelled, "a Star-Wars themed online casino designed to lure kids", according to Hawaiian politician Chris Lee.

From here things only blew up further, but everything finally changed.

Battlefront 2 overhauled its design, as did For Honor and Shadow of War. Various legal restrictions are now in place - dependant on country - to disclose things like drop rates for loot boxes, or to force on-box mentions of the microtransaction systems within.

MTX are obviously still in many titles, but consumers finally have the power to flag them on a public forum, gathering enough momentum for things to be amended immediately.

2017 was the worst of it, and thankfully, we haven't seen anything quite so bad since.