Electronic Arts’ Community Manager, Ben Walke, has said that the upcoming Need for Speed Heat will not come with loot boxes aka surprise mechanics.
“There are no loot boxes in Need for Speed Heat and there won’t be,” Walke told a fan on Reddit, where he goes by the screen name F8RGE. “We plan to have post-launch paid DLC in the form of car packs. Later this year we’ll introduce a time-save pack, which will show all collectibles on the map. That’s it.”
When a user seemed skeptical of the claim and wondered if EA would change its stance later and throw its Community Manager under the bus, Walke reminded fans that this isn’t his first rodeo as he manages several communities for the publisher, including Star Wars and Battlefield.
“Coming into the reveal, one of the things we agreed we would detail is the monetization options, no loot boxes, car packs etc.,” Walke added. “No scapegoat here.”
Elsewhere on Reddit, Walke reassured fans that Need for Speed Heat isn’t Payback 2, and said that he’s “confident” such discussions will cease once people get their hands on the upcoming title. Responding separately to players who suggested that Ghost Games should borrow ideas from older Need for Speed titles, Walke wrote:
NFS is a mixture of many things, many of those depending on who you ask. If all we did is make the same old game, things would get boring. And no, a carbon copy of a game from 15 years ago wouldn’t work, not today – gaming has moved on. I do not want to keep playing the same game every year. Something new is nice, but obviously not forgetting what made games good in the past. We will always try new stuff, sometimes we might not get it 100% right, but that’s fine, as long as we keep learning, improving and adapting.
Need for Speed Heat will release on November 8, 2019 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
[Source: Reddit]
