Can you pay for the orbs?
Not long ago, at TGS, we had a chance to try Devil May Cry 5. The demo introduced Dante, the famous character of this series. However, in this sequel, he played a secondary role to Nero. In this demo, we saw the Divinity Statue, known as a shop in which players are able to trade in orbs that they’ve collected in battle or exploration. Based on information on the menu, we found out that players are allowed to spend real money to own more orbs if they want to speed up the process of upgrading and power up Dante faster than usual.
We asked Hideaki Itsuno, director of this series from Capcom, about the importance of this system in Devil May Cry 5. Itsuno said that this system will give the players more choices to play the game in any way they want. He wanted players to have an option to purchase Red Orbs so that players can save time and get things done faster if they want to. However, he didn’t think players have to obtain all moves, they should be given a choice to play it in their own ways.
It was quite unusual to know that this feature is included in Devil May Cry 5 but not included in the first game of this series. Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition also features them.
Next, we asked Itsuno about how microtransactions will affect the next Devil May Cry game’s learning process of playing. Based on our experience with this type of games, unlocking and gaining new abilities gradually are far more natural ways to develop skills and acquiring a higher rank of performance in combat.
He explained that in a game designer’s viewpoint, his team considered 2 factors before setting the prices of the abilities, skills, and moves. Firstly, the things that he thinks players will want to get first will be made cheaper. After he did that, players probably think that they will buy it because it’s cheap. Secondly, there are other things that are more challenging to use and master, which will be made more expensive. The reason for this is you have to save up for those things, so you can’t buy too many skills, thus you will have the time to learn them. As a result, you must choose between aiming for those cheaper things or saving up to get other things that have lots of applications but it takes more time to learn and master them.
To have a firm understanding of the way microtransactions affect Devil May Cry 5, we will have to wait until the game is released, which is Spring 2019, and then we can try it. For more of our experience with Dante, don’t miss our video preview of Devil May Cry 5.