Believe it or not, there was a time when multiplayer games didn’t have microtransactions. You bought the game, played it, and if you liked it you picked up any expansions that came out further down the line and the world rested peacefully.
Then came the era where you could buy horse armor for your mount in Skyrim and turn your automatic assault rifle pure gold in Call of Duty and the cosmos shifted. Now, with our bank accounts permanently connected to constantly hacked developers servers and payment gateways, we can open up a Loot Box and hopefully get a player card with a rating of 84 instead of 83, at least for this season, before we lose them all when next years version of the game comes out.
Until now one game has bucked the trend, Escape from Tarkov has been Escape from Microtransactions but sadly, not for much longer. Somewhat more irritatingly, not all the purchases are purely cosmetic either like we get in Fortnite. PC GameN reports that beyond paying to unlock new clothing options early, you can also purchase the offline co-op mode.
Okay fine, that’s newish to the game and it has been around for eight years so is a decent additional feature. The next change though allows you to pay for a quality-of-life addition by increasing your Stash size by up to 280 slots.
You will be able to earn these extra slots in the game without paying for them also, but this will obviously involve a grind or what’s the point in buying them, potentially making the game more enjoyable for those who wish to purchase.
These features were previously available in the Edge of Darkness edition of the game which has now been removed, and if you bought that you will not have to get them again. A post from Battlestate Games’ chief operating officer Nikita Buyanov says:
“So, the thing is that we want to add purchasable options for EFT players cause:
- We removed the EoD version and some of the EoD features need to go back (offline co-op for example).
- The game is running for eight years without any additional flow. You just buy and play it forever, and it’s a pretty unique situation for a game such as EFT.”
It also goes on to state that there will be no in-game currency gear packages and the like to buy, just what has been mentioned so far.
These changes will arrive in “the near future” and be available from your profile page on the Escape from Tarkov website as we wave goodbye to the end of an era.
