One thing that managed to survive the fall of the Tower and the Last City in Destiny 2 is Tess Everis’ Eververse Trading Co. shop, where you can swap the game’s Silver microtransaction currency for things like emotes and other cosmetic items. This was introduced after the release of The Taken King as a way to generate money for the game’s continued development and still provide additional expansion-like content and events without selling smaller paid DLC expansions – Destiny 2, funnily enough, features both microtransactions and two paid expansions in its first year.
Taking on the now traditional loot box format with its Bright Engrams, you can get all manner of vanity goods, from armour skins to Sparrows, Ships, Ghost Shells and weapon mods that can tweak the perks that your armour convey on your combat ability.
What has the community up in arms, as seen is that armour shaders are now single use items, must be applied to each individual piece of armour, and is deleted if you remove or re-colour a piece of gear. Yes, it means you can mix and match colours and shaders and come up with more diverse looks, but in the original Destiny, you would earn a shader and then be able to swap them back and forth. In essence it takes the Chroma system of cosmetics that was introduced for some armour in the original Destiny after Rise of Iron and spins it out across the whole game with microtransactions.
At the time of writing, five of the first ten non-stickied threads on the Destiny sub-reddit are to do with the shaders one way or another. Some are calling to boycott the microtransactions, others directly asking Bungie to reverse the design choice, but it will likely be a storm in a teacup. By and large, the game has received a very positive reaction from the community, and as SunsetCorn’s thread says, “Can we take a moment to appreciate that our biggest gripe with the game is the shaders?”
Will Bungie see this and react in a positive way, or will they just ignore it until it goes away? How do you feel about this style of cosmetic microtransaction?
via Reddit
Tony Cawley
Storm in a tea cup. People just don’t like change, if it’d always been like this people would have been fine with it.
I actually like the new shader system because they can be applied to guns etc as well, and like you said you can mix and match across armour pieces.
Jambo
Am in two minds over it, it is probably my least favourite thing with the game but also after a day of play I have loads of shaders so how big an issue is it going to be?
Tuffcub
Boycott Microtransations – aka – Don’t use them if you don’t like them – aka Common bloody sense.