Devil May Cry 5 will have upgrade microtransactions

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Red orbs for cash.

In Devil May Cry 5 you'll be able to collect red orbs and trade them in for upgrades but, as Gamespot noticed during a recent demo of the forthcoming game, there's also an option to pay for them with real money. They asked Hideaki Itsuno, director of Devil May Cry 5, for clarification.

"With giving people the ability to purchase Red Orbs, it’s something we want to give people as an option. 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, " he said. "You should be able to play it the way you want to play it."

This isn't the first time a Devil May Cry game has had the option to pay for upgrades with cash. The special edition of Devil May Cry 4 released in 2015 added them as well, with options to pay for red orbs, blue orbs, and proud souls as DLC.

The difference there is that microtransactions were added to a game that had already been balanced to play without them, and was by most accounts pretty generous with its rewards. Devil May Cry 5 will have microtransactions baked in from the start, which will make it harder to give it the benefit of the doubt if it ever starts to feel stingy with those orbs.

Devil May Cry 5 is due on March 8, 2019.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.