Forza Motorsport 7 will ditch its loot box-like prize crate system, and developer Turn 10 promises the controversial paid token system will not be coming to the game – or to the upcoming Forza Horizon 4. Forza 7 does not – and did not – offer any microtransactions for purchase, but their potential inclusion has proven a source of significant controversy for the game.
Turn 10 says “One major area of discussion for the team has been prize crates. While we’ve never charged money for prize crates in Forza Motorsport 7, their presence in the game has continued to be a source of controversy. The overwhelming feedback has been that this system feels out of place in the game. After careful consideration, we have decided to completely remove prize crates from Forza Motorsport 7.”
Prize crates won’t be removed entirely until this winter, “due to the complexity” of removing them from the game while building a new system to access the items they provided. More immediately, cars have been removed from those crates, and 100 previously exclusive cars have since been unlocked.
The blog post also says “paid tokens – which were a part of previous Forza games – will not be coming to Forza Motorsport 7 or Forza Horizon 4.” That’s a particularly welcome bit of news, since in past Forza games, paid tokens typically missed launch and were added later – and Turn 10 did plan to put them in Motorsport 7, according to a statement received by Ars Technica at the time.
Though Forza Motorsport 7 has not had microtransactions since launch, it did come out in the several-month window when loot box controversy was at its hottest, around the releases of Middle-earth: Shadow of War and Star Wars: Battlefront II. (Controversial changes to the VIP system certainly didn’t help.) If paid tokens had been added, it would’ve likely turned prize crates into a loot box system that you could either earn in-game or pay for separately – something nobody wanted at the time, and something we apparently still won’t see in the future.