The Resident Evil 4 Remake releases its free The mercenaries DLC, a “reinvented” original game mode that allows players to take on enemy herds in timed challenges, along with a perhaps less welcome addition: microtransactions.
You can now purchase Weapon Exclusive Upgrade Tickets, which grant you access to “the exclusive upgrade of a weapon, regardless of the weapon’s tier” at any time. You can also trade for them by trading with the merchant 30 Spinel Gems for a Fast Pass ticket and 40 Spinels for a second.
But the DLC version offers “Not only that, but once unlocked, the upgrade itself is free!” the Steam description continues. How generous!
An “exclusive upgrade”, in RE4refers to a weapon’s unique, final upgrade. For example, the exclusive upgrade to the brain-crushing Striker Shotgun doubles its ammo capacity, and the Serrated Combat Knife gets a 1.5x increase in its attack speed. You usually unlock these by completing all of a weapon’s upgrades and then buying the last one, the exclusive one, with a bunch of pesetas (the most expensive exclusives cost 100,000 pesetas).
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But RE4With new microtransactions from , you can save real money on already-cut corners by offering these merchant tickets in packs of one ($3), three ($7), and five ($10). There are also multiple sets of the ones and threes, so in theory you could buy an upgrade for every single weapon you use in the game.
These upgrade tickets are not limited to The mercenaries DLC, the You can download now for an arcade-style slaughterhouse challenge; They will be “available for all your save data,” the Steam descriptions state.
Since RE4 is a single player game, it doesn’t bother me that much. I already demeaned myself by buying the $70 deluxe edition of the game which lets you start the game with the Sentinel Nine pistol and the Skull Shaker shotgun. Both helped immensely as they tumbled through the game nasty village starting area.
The Deluxe Edition also includes these “sporty” sunglasses for Leon, which definitely feels like pay-to-win to me. Personally, I have trouble asserting myself RE4 unless Leon looks like a pretty Oakley sponsored princess.
While I like making games easier for me, I can understand why some people do that are frustrated with what appears to be Capcom to unnecessarily reach for extra cash. But you could probably make the same argument about them Resident Evil 4 Remake overall, which feels like the studio’s eight hundred thousand millionth Re-release of the game from 2005.
The good news is that you don’t have to buy any of these. Whether you’re comfortable with it or not, and apart from the fact that you need it price transparency across all industries RE4‘s microtransactions remind us that we don’t have to buy all that shit corporations tell us, but we do need to we don’t actually need it.
