Gears 5 Multiplayer Characters Can Be Bought with Real Money

Gears 5 is rolling along, and it will be coming out… soon-ish, as I understand. There’s a lot we don’t know about this game, but we learned a little bit more than before thanks to a new interview with multiplayer design director Ryan Cleven, who spoke with Gamespot on the subject of the game’s upcoming versus multiplayer Arcade mode.

One thing we learned for sure was that the game was going to be a twist on the hero shooter, in that you’ll select from a number of characters that have their own playstyles and abilities, but they’ll also have unique loadouts that will impact how they play pretty dramatically. But if you think that just because the characters impact gameplay and this is a premium game that you don’t have to pay to unlock all of them, well, you’re invested in the wrong business m’friends: because in order to unlock new heroes, you’ll either need to ‘earn them’ through an in-game grind, or buy them with the premium “Iron” currency.

This, like any Rainbow Siege Six player will tell you, will probably involve an absolutely insane amount of grinding, since not only will these characters be playable in the other modes in the game (namely, a Horde mode and a co-op thing called Escape), they’ll have a much smaller pool than most other hero shooters, which will probably give them a reason to want to pad out earning all of them.

There’s only one spot of ‘good’ news: this model is being used as opposed to, rather than to compliment, loot boxes. So you won’t have to pay for just the chance to earn the character you care about. The same applies to cosmetics, rather than getting a pack or anything, you just straight-up buy whatever new look you might be hankering for.

Which, I guess, is still technically an improvement.