'Devil May Cry 5' Characters Can Be Upgraded With Real Money

In Capcom's upcoming hack-and-slash action-adventure game, Devil May Cry 5, players will be able [...]

devil may cry 5 squad
(Photo: Capcom)

In Capcom's upcoming hack-and-slash action-adventure game, Devil May Cry 5, players will be able to spend real-life money to speed up the process of character upgrades.

News of the feature comes way of GameSpot, who recently spent some hands-on time with the game at Tokyo Game Show.

According to Peter Brown, there's something called a "Divinity Statue" in the game, which serves essentially as a shop. At it, you trade-in orbs that you collected from combat encounters and exploring the game's world for upgrades.

While doing this, GameSpot came across a menu that allowed players to spend real, cold-hard cash to acquire more orbs, which in turn, could be used to expedite the process of upgrading characters. Or in other words, if you inject some cash into your playthrough, you can beef up your characters more quickly than the traditional way.

So, why is this option in the game? Well, according to director Hideaki Itsuno, it's because Capcom wants to give players more choices.

"With giving people the ability to purchase Red Orbs, it's something we want to give people as an option, said Itsuno. "If they want to save time and just want to get all the stuff at once, those people can do that. But on the other hand I don't feel you have to get all the moves. You should be able to play it the way you want to play it."

As you may know, this feature -- pitched as a bump in player options -- is increasingly common in games, and isn't even new to the series. Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition featured a similar feature.

GameSpot followed up with Itsuno, asking about how microtransactions will impact the natural learning process of the game. As it points out, simply buying upgrades will negatively impact a player's natural progression with the game, or at least, that is what is thought to often happen.

Answering this, Itsuno replied:

"It's interesting because from a game design point of view there's two different things we think about when we set the prices of the moves, skills, and abilities [which can be purchased with Red Orbs]. The first thing is the stuff that we feel people should want to get first is made cheaper. So people will think, 'Oh this is cheap so I'm just going to buy this.' But then for the stuff that's going to be harder to use and master, we make that more expensive. Partly because of you save up for that you're not going to be able to buy as many skills, so you're going to have the time to learn it. So you have to make the decision between going for the cheaper stuff or saving up, getting the thing that has a lot of application but you'll have to spend time learning and perfecting."

Devil May Cry 5 is poised to release on March 8, 2019 via the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. For more news, media, and information on the title, click here.

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