While we are seeing an obvious trend of developers starting to copy Fortnite’s battle royale format in order to emulate that game’s success, I’m guessing we’re going to see others copy a different aspect of it as well: its monetization model.
Fortnite is a free-to-play game that sells cosmetics, but also one major thing that most avid players are apt to buy: a battle pass.
A battle pass lasts for the length of the season, and unlocks a series of challenges that allow players to rank up throughout the course of a season, acquiring new cosmetic items as they move up through the tiers.
I’ve been thinking about how this system could be applied to a game like Destiny 2. No, Destiny 2 isn’t going to become free-to-play to adopt this model, but literally every $60 game these days is layering addition microtransactions on top of that, so it would hardly be unusual. And it would likely be better than what we see in the game now.
The idea is pretty simple. Instead of engrams which rotate with new cosmetic items in the Eververse store every season, players would instead be prompted with the option of buying a $10 battle pass that would cover the length of the season, and would offer every cosmetic reward in it if they can grind through all the different tiers. If they can’t, the cosmetics would be offered for sale individually, costing a specific amount of silver each.
There are plenty of items that could fill up 100 tiers of a Destiny 2 battle pass. In bright/illuminated engrams already there are:
- Shaders
- Ghost Shells
- Emotes
- Transmat Effects
- Sparrows
- Weapon Ornaments
- Armor Pieces
- Ships
For this to work, some changes would need to be made to a few of these (shaders and transmat effects should be permanent, not consumable), but the bones are there to easily make this work. Tier 1 might be an emote. Tier 50 might be an awesome ornament for your favorite sniper rifle. Tier 100 might be the helmet to complete a badass set of battle pass-specific armor.
Progress would be shared across all your characters. You would receive daily and weekly quests and challenges that would contribute toward ranking up the battle pass, but playing the game generally, getting kills and earning XP in any mode, would also help you along. If you are determined enough to play Destiny 2 for the long haul, you could end up with every new cosmetic offered for just that initial $10, when under the current system, that could take you hundreds or thousands of dollars with engram gambling.
Loot boxes are on their way out. Some of the worst offenders like Battlefront and Shadow of War are stripping them out of their games entirely. Destiny even realizes it, as recent in-game events have made it so that event engrams couldn’t be bought at all, only earned. But switching over to a more generous, more attractive battle pass system might kill two dregs with one stone. You’d eliminate annoying loot boxes for good, while also creating a system that has the potential to A) reward the most dedicated players willing to grind and B) still be able to make money from those who want to purchase specific items directly.
The main complication that I can see is not just that Destiny 2 is a $60 game, but also that it’s one with paid DLC as well. A $10 battle pass on top of $20 small DLC and $40 expansions could seem like a lot. I’m not sure what kind of compromise could be implemented here, but perhaps the battle pass could come bundled free with paid seasonal DLC/expansions, or at least be available at a discount. And then in seasons where there isn’t DLC to kick off a season (year 2, year 3, potentially), it could be sold on its own.
Destiny had the bare bones of this idea once upon a time with its record books, which were a good concept, but offered far less rewards than what we see with a Fortnite-style battle pass. But the point is that most people liked that idea, and if it could be dramatically expanded, it might be a new component of Destiny 2 that would get people to return and keep playing, depending on how it was handled.
I don’t have every detail sorted out, but I think there’s potential here, and anything is going to be better than the current Eververse/engram system.
Update: Well, I wrote this entire article having missed yesterday’s announcement of a “Prismatic Matrix” which will be a new way to earn specific Eververse items and avoid duplicates. It sounds like a…rather complicated fix that doesn’t really solve the underlying problems with Eververse, and is only a fractional part of a true battle pass system, so I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’m going to need to see it in action first before I can fully judge it.
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