AC Origins Will Have Loot Chests, But (Maybe) Not The Bad Kind

Assassin’s Creed Origins will have loot chests, it seems. They’re called Heka chests, and you’ll be able to buy them using in-game currency. At this point, there’s no word on whether you’ll be able to spend real money on AC pretend money. For now, they look fairly innocuous, but only time will tell.

The chests will be sold by a wandering merchant. Approach his stall, the nomad’s bazaar, and you’ll be given the option to buy a Heka chest for 3000 gold coins. It will open automatically as soon as you buy it, giving you a random piece of weaponry or a shield. The items inside range from merely acceptable to divine in quality, and every purchase is a gamble.

If the devs don’t allow players to buy gold using real money, it’ll end up a lot like buying unidentified items in RPGs. A bit worse, since you might end up not only with a weapon that’s worse than the one you have, but also the wrong type. In other words, it’ll almost certainly be a bad idea to spend your hard-earned gold coins on it, but at least not financially damaging outside of the game.

I once bought a weapon from Wirt the Peg-Legged Boy in Tristram. Once and never again. It cost me an arm and a leg, and it was a total piece of trash. The little runt taught me an important life lesson, bless his peg-legged soul.

Still, a large number of players enjoy the loot-shower genre, as evidenced by Destiny 2. Games like that always have that one moment when you hit the power ceiling and would sell out your own mother for a fix in the form of a slightly better weapon. In times like these, it’s important to have a way to entice players to keep grinding, and that is exactly what Heka chests, engrams and poor old Wirt do.