Hyper Scape is Ubisoft’s brand new battle royale game. It launched last week, but it’s already got a major flaw as far as I’m concerned. There are two premium battle passes. This is a practice that already existed in Fortnite, and possible some other similar games, but it’s not one that I think is either conducive to a good community environment, or a healthy relationship with a game.
To be clear, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with Hyper Scape as a game. I’ve not played enough of it to pass any real kind of judgement, it’s purely the microtransactions that I think will be an issue for some gamers in the long run. There are currently two battle passes in the game, the Premium Battle Pass, and the Hyper Battle Pass, the more premium version of the premium pass.
The Premium Battle Pass will set you back 950 Bitcrowns, which is the in-game currency. I don’t know how easy these are to obtain by playing the game, but I’d guess that you need to play for an entire season in order to earn enough to pay back the cost of the pass. That’s how it works in Fortnite and Apex Legends at least. On PlayStation 4 you can purchase the Hyper Scape Season 1 Starter Pack for £7.99 in the UK, which comes with 1,000 Bitcrowns, among other things. This is about right for a battle pass price, especially if you’ll earn back the money you spend eventually.
The Hyper Battle Pass is another matter entirely. This pass costs 2500 Bitcrowns. You can buy 2,875 Bitcrowns for £19.99, so this pass is about twice the price of the original, though the shortfall is made up for in the free 25 levels you get automatically with this version of the pass. On it’s own, I don’t see anything wrong with this pass, but I think that if it’s a continuous feature, then some people are going to get stuck in a loop of paying £20 for a battle pass in a game every season.
It’s really easy to slip into a habit of shelling out cash on a game for automatic rewards. The game plays on your fear of missing out on those exclusive goods, but there’s really nothing bad that’s going to happen as a result. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this model change pretty quickly, because it automatically puts half the play base that is willing to spend money on the game at a disadvantage. No one likes that.
