Forza Motorsport 7 to completely phase out prize crates by winter
It's no longer hip to be square
The lootpocalypse continues, and the boxes have been sent packing once more. Forza Motorsport 7 is the next game to join this trend of ditching gambling-like elements from games, as developers Turn 10 Studios announced plans to completely remove prize crates from the Xbox/Windows 10 flagship racing series by sometime in winter. Accompanying the news is a 50% discount on the game over on the Microsoft Store.
Forza 7's prize crates were never sold for real money - merely in-game currency - but they still introduced a messy element of chance to the game and your progression through it, with eight different tiers available to buy with your race winnings. The contained a variety of mods, liveries, gear for your driver and even whole cars (they were very large boxes), so I'm all in favour of them switching to a more direct purchasing option, especially if prices remain roughly equivalent.
Unfortunately, the boxes seem quite well entrenched in Forza 7, so Turn 10 are having to call in the heavy artillery to ensure the threat is properly boxed in. It'll take some time until the prize crate system is fully removed from the game, but until they can remove boxes entirely, they have removed cars from the loot tables. They claim that there's now no competitive advantage to be won through opening prize crates, which seems like a major improvement.
On top of taking a crowbar to loot boxes, they've also announced that Forza Motorsport 7 and the upcoming Forza Horizon 4 will not be using paid tokens, a special real-money currency used to buy cars in-game. Earlier Forza games used this system (and still do). It feels like an especially poor fit for any competitive game, so I'm doubly glad to see that gone from the series as a whole. Hopefully with a few more high-profile announcements like this, other developers will hesitate before considering loot box systems, even if no real money is involved.
Forza Motorsport 7 is currently 50% off on the Microsoft Store, bringing it down to £25/€35/$30 for the Standard Edition. Something about that Euro price doesn't look quite right, though...