Single player games rarely have any microtransactions in them, but Capcom will be adding them in Devil May Cry 5. This is the second time they’ll be in the franchise as they were added previously in the 2015 release of Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition.
Gamespot had a chance to play Devil May Cry 5 recently at TGS 2018 and they stumbled upon the microtransactions while playing the game. The website also had a chance to interview the game’s director Hideaki Itsuno. Itsuno explained in more detail why microstransactions exist in the game.
He said: “With giving people the ability to purchase Red Orbs, it’s something we want to give people as an option. If they want to save time and just want to get all the stuff at once, those people can do that. But on the other hand I don’t feel you have to get all the moves. You should be able to play it the way you want to play it.“.
In the older video games, you normally had to gather red orbs by killing enemies or finding them throughout the levels. Red orbs are then used for you to shop for better abilities. It sounds like in the fifth game, Capcom is giving players the option to bypass the grinding so they can pay to get the cooler abilities at a faster rate.
Itsuno further said: “The first thing is the stuff that we feel people should want to get first is made cheaper. So people will think, ‘Oh this is cheap so I’m just going to buy this.’ But then for the stuff that’s going to be harder to use and master, we make that more expensive. Partly because of you save up for that you’re not going to be able to buy as many skills, so you’re going to have the time to learn it. So you have to make the decision between going for the cheaper stuff or saving up, getting the thing that has a lot of application but you’ll have to spend time learning and perfecting .It’s interesting because from a game design point of view there’s two different things we think about when we set the prices of the moves, skills, and abilities [which can be purchased with Red Orbs]“.
Hopefully the game is balanced so that you don’t have to grind too many hours to earn red orbs without spending real money on them. We won’t find out until the game releases on March 8th, 2019 for the PC, PS4 and Xbox One platforms.