Garden Warfare’s in-game store is the place where you’ll buy defensive plants for use in the game’s Garden Ops horde mode, new class variants for your plants or zombies, and cool gear to customise your plant/zombie squad. It’s also where Garden Warfare deviates the most from other shooters. Where other in-game stores lets you earn or pay for specific items in their respective stores, Garden Warfare randomises this process by using a collectible card-like system of packs. Buy a pack and you’re given a random assortment of cards, which will either contain defensive plants, stickers that need to be collected to unlock class variants, or other gear. Like other collectible card games, each pack will contain a set number of “rare” cards, although you can pay for more expensive packs that will guarantee better or more lucrative card types.
You’ll pay for card packs using in-game currency earned by playing through Garden Warfare. But how about microtransactions? A system where cards are earned randomly seems ripe for such a move, so will Garden Warfare go the way of some other recent console games and try to implement a microtransaction system? The answer, right now, seems to be a solid maybe. During my gameplay session, a PopCap representative told me that a final decision on the inclusion of microtransactions was still to be decided. They’ll have to make that call soon, though, with the game due for release on February 25 for the Xbox One and on the Xbox 360.