Monolith recently announced that their upcoming title Middle Earth: Shadow of War is going to have microtransactions, and the response is quite negative, to say the least. A major part of the community feels naturally repulsive when it comes to microtransactions, and it’s completely understandable. The track record of of such transactions hasn’t been great, thanks to the good folks like those at EA. More often than not, they end up being counter-productive for the players. But here’s the thing. The way Monolith is going about the concept in their game, they couldn’t have done a better job.
For a crash course, here’s how the Shadow of War currency system works. It comes in two forms, Myrian (in-game) and gold (which is real money). Also, whatever you can buy with gold using your real money, you can also find in-game, and this includes everything from armour and weapons to bundles and Orc followers. Now, being able to buy followers did come as a little unusual to me, but if someone wants to spend cash on a single-player game that helps them progress faster, who am I to judge?
There are a lot of people who are against microtransactions completely on principle. While I agree it’s hard to blame them, I also need to say that in this case it doesn’t really make sense. I mean, people need to realize that Shadow of War is essentially a single-player game. There’s no competitive or multiplayer aspect, so it doesn’t matter if someone wants to spend money on in-game items, because it will not affect anyone else’s game but their own. It’s sort of like having microtransactions for cosmetic items in Overwatch or DOTA 2 or CS:GO. You can spend as much money on them as you want, it won’t have an effect on how you or other people around you play the game.
One of the best things about Shadow of Mordor was dominating and getting rid of the Orc army, making your way to the top of the command chain. And I’m really excited about the part in Shadow of War where you can recruit Orc and create your own army. So I would never go around buying Orcs, as that would end up taking all the fun out of it. But if someone else wants to drop in some of their money because they don’t really want to go through the grind, it’s their choice. It’s actually great that Monolith is leaving it up to the players to decide how they want to go about it, ’cause let’s face it, not every one has the time to go for 100% game completion. I sympathize with those people, but you can’t really blame them.
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Another major complaint with the game is that it requires to be always online. That’s actually not true. Again, with emphasis on the single-player part, you can play the entire game offline if you want to. Internet connection is only required for certain features, which is basically the microtransactions. And let’s face it, if you’re shelling out money on in-game items, I’m not sure how you’d go about it without an internet connection.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of microtransactions and in no way am I trying to defend the practice. But I have also spent a decent amount of money on in-game items in DOTA 2, and they’re all purely cosmetic. So let’s not be hasty in passing judgement and let the damn game release first, for God’s sake.
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