Halo 5 Microtransaction Pricing Revealed

Everything in Halo 5: Guardians' new REQ system can be earned through traditional gameplay. But if you'd like to get going faster, you will be able to pay real-world money for that convenience. In a blog post, 343 Industries revealed pricing details for the game's various REQ Packs and talked more about how they work.

Halo 5 REQ Pack/Microtransaction Pricing Details

Bronze:

• In-game currency cost: 1250 RP
• Real-world money cost: not offered

Silver:

• In-game currency cost: 5000 RP
• Real-world money cost: $2

Gold:

• In-game currency cost: 10,000 RP
• Real-world money cost: $3

343 explained that in-game pricing has been set so that players can afford at least one REQ Pack for every other game played. You should expect to earn around 2000 RP for every Warzone game played, meaning it won't take very long to reach Silver or Gold status. In addition, everyone gets 7500 RP to start.

On top of these three REQ Packs, Microsoft will offer a Warzone REQ Bundle, which comes with two "Premium" packs every week for seven weeks (for a total of 14). This bundle is included with the Halo 5 premium bundles, or it can be purchased separately for $25.

In addition, 343 isn't taking all of Halo 5's microtransaction revenue for itself. A "portion" of the proceeds of all REQ Packs will be added to the Halo World Championship prize pool. For lots more, check out the full blog post about Halo 5's REQ system.

GameSpot recently spoke with 343 design director Kevin Franklin about Halo 5's microtransactions. An excerpt from our interview is below; read the full thing here.

"Everything you can get in the REQ system, you can earn whether you spend money or not," he said. "There's no crazy special items that are only going to be reserved for people who spend a lot more money. Also, you get a lot of rewards whether you're playing Arena or Warzone, so you're always going to have a ton of stuff that you'll be able to use. The biggest thing for us the moment we started even talking about this system was that the game has to be balanced. At the end of the day, it's a multiplayer game. It's not a spend-more-to-win game. We wanted to make sure that if you spend a whole ton of money, and you thought you could get five scorpions just because you spent more money, it's not going to work. You're still going to have to earn the right to call these scorpions into the battlefield.

"So we have a mid-session progression loop, which any MOBA player will be familiar with. You have to level your character up in-game, every game, by killing enemies, going after A.I., and contributing to your team. Then you'll unlock the ability to use these cards. So if you have ten scorpions, you can't just call in ten scorpions. You actually have an energy system, and that levelling system that will gate you and keep the end-game balanced. And that was really huge--we're multiplayer designers, we can't just make a really unbalanced game. It just wouldn't feel Halo."

Halo 5 launches on October 27 exclusively for Xbox One. The game recently achieved "gold" status, meaning development on the base game is finished, though 343 continues to work on post-release content, including December's Forge mode and lots of free DLC maps. In addition, Microsoft will promote the game through specially painted Master Chief and Spartan Locke cars at a NASCAR event.