My review of the stellar cyberpunk stealth-adventure game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was based on a retail version, which means it had received a "day-one" patch and contained all of the game's content... with one exception. The microtransaction system hadn't yet gone live.
At the time, this shop was limited to DX:MD's "Breach" mode, which combines arcade-style challenges and a "card-unlock" system for beefing your character up. This system works similarly to games like Hearthstone, in that you earn new cards and perks through normal gameplay, but since their rewards are random, you may feel compelled to pay money for more random-card unlocks. Also, because you can only equip so many perks at a time, and normal gameplay unlocks a ton of content, you don't really need to pay into this system to get the full game experience.
It's not ideal, but I ruled that this kind of microtransaction system was all in all tolerable for what was essentially a free bonus mode on top of an already-huge campaign in the retail package. Looks like Eidos Montreal had other ideas, however.
Boo and hiss
As it turns out, the game's publishers and developers slapped a paid-money system into the campaign mode, which makes DX:MD one of the rare modern $60-for-a-quest games where you can pay additional money to beef yourself up. You get two options in this regard: buy more in-game "credits," which you use at the game's shops to buy more weapons, ammo, and items, or buy "Praxis Kits," which you spend on hero Adam Jensen's cyborg-ability upgrades. Each time you level up, you get one Praxis Kit, and most upgrades require spending one to two Kits.
Boo and hiss, Eidos Montreal. Boo and hissssss.
In terms of credits, well, you'd be a fool to pay real money for those in the game. They're everywhere. They're plentiful. Thousands of credits are just lying around, and the stuff they pay for is also very easy to steal off of dead bodies or inside of desks and lockers. There's a lot of poverty in DX:MD's version of futuristic Prague, but really, these people just need to install Quicken or something. Bad money and property management all around.
Praxis Kits, on the other hand, are spread out perfectly in the campaign. The fact that side quests earn you these kits at a nice clip make them all the more succulent to complete—which, in turn, sucks players into a lot of nicely developed mission and plot content that they might otherwise miss if they power-leveled and went straight through the main mission path. Paying for these kits would break one of the things that Eidos Montreal really got right in this adventure.
Eidos Montreal even admitted as much in trying to douse the flames that these microtransactions inspired, with one of the game's community managers taking to Reddit to tell fans that "the game was balanced 100 percent independently of the microtransactions available in the store." Based on my time with the game, I fully believe that assertion—and I wouldn't be shocked if developers and marketers faced off about adding the paid stuff.
One-time-use DLC?
At least in gameplay terms, you can safely ignore the paid boosts; whether you respect Eidos Montreal less for introducing them as an option at all is another matter. Worse, however, is that some of the game's DLC pack content, which is granted either by a season pass, a pre-order, or individual purchase, is one-time-use only. Meaning, if you claim items, cash, or other perks from the game's redemption system, they can no longer be applied to a new mission, which is bad news if you restart the game from scratch on either a new save file or a new system.
The same Eidos Montreal community manager posted on Reddit about this, saying that certain types of items don't suffer from this one-time-only system, including weapons and augmentations (meaning the boosts you'd buy using Praxis Kits). The ones that do, however, are limited due to "first-party constraints," according to the community manager. What that vague reference to Sony and Microsoft means, nobody's sure, but the limitation also applies to the game's build on Windows PC.
To clarify the distinction: let's say you pay $5 for the "Tactical Pack." This gets you a custom-skinned Tranquilizer Rifle in the game and a specific "augmentation" (which you'd otherwise unlock using Praxis Kits), along with a bunch of higher-level ammo. The first two things can easily be regenerated in future playthroughs. The ammo disappears into the ether.
Should players really want to hold on to those one-time-only DLC items for future playthroughs, they're currently stuck with a sloppy workaround: holding on to a save file in the game's tutorial mission in which the DLC items are claimed and saved in their inventory. Or, of course, if they're playing on PC, they could search for a free "trainer" download that helps players cheat their way to boosts in XP, Praxis Kits, and other items; Ars has found a few in the wild already, but we're choosing not to link to them (mostly because they disrupt the game's solid content flow).
Paying for "chip set" boosts in the Breach mode could also leave users stranded if their save files are wiped for any reason. While testing the pre-release version of the game, I had unlocked Breach card packs by making progress in the campaign mode, but after a patch, the system told me I could no longer claim those packs—due to Eidos Montreal's servers checking my progress and believing I'd already redeemed boosts that I hadn't. Eidos Montreal had to manually update my progress during the review period to fix this error. Average users may not receive such singled-out treatment should their Breach boosts, either earned or paid, suddenly vanish.
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