EA Reduces Some of the Grind in Star Wars Battlefront 2

Another day, another headline for EA. But unlike most of that news as of late, this one is actually… “good”, if you want to call it that. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it “less bad.”

Anyway: In Star Wars Battlefront 2, the game that’s been at the center of this hurricane, in order to boost your stats and unlock content you have to use loot boxes. Pop one open and you can a certain number of random “Star Cards” which you can equip to improve your performance or unlock new abilities, or you can scrap them in order to improve existing ones. Previously, there were two ways to unlock these crates: you could either play a bunch of matches and slowly earn in-game credits, which could be spent on crates, or you could spend some real-world cash.

The latter option has been removed (temporarily), and now your only way to get better is just to grind, as the amount of credits you earn in-game are rather piddling and capped when you play offline. But just the other day, EA surprised us by significantly increasing the number of credits you unlock in-game, making it way easier to get the loot boxes you crave.

Now, the average player earns about 600 credits for a match, whereas in the past 300 was about the most you could expect in a match where you performed well. Plus, the offline mode now caps at 1,500 credits, rather than the old 500.

But perhaps the biggest change is with the login bonus: in the past, starting up the game once a day would earn you a cool five credits and a few crafting parts. But now you get a whole login box, which includes 15 varied parts, making it much more, you know, useful.

It’s still a grind, of course, but it’s a pretty nice change. Enough to make people forgive EA? Of course not. But it’s something.

And, likely, the first “something” of a long list of incoming changes.