Nine months ago, the practice of loot boxes in games was hit with controversy over the violation of gambling rules in certain countries. Both Belgium and Netherlands publicly called for changes to be made to the way they were implemented in games. While the majority of titles have carried on as they were before, Epic Games has taken the feedback on board and will be making changes to their V-Buck Llamas in Fortnite’s Save The World mode.
The V-Buck Llamas will be undergoing a name change. From update v7.30 onwards, they will be known as X-Ray Llamas instead. Why? Because players will be able to see the contents of every Llama before they buy it, so players can make a decision whether the purchase will be worth it to them. If they don’t want to buy that Llama, they can wait until the store is refreshed that day and wait for the new selection of Llamas.
Epic Games goes into more detail on how this will work:
- Llamas prices remain the same, and llamas can still be earned through gameplay.
- The price doesn’t change when the llama upgrades - you can see the upgrade before you purchase, and any item can come from the cheapest Llama. You can wait and find your favorite weapon in a 50 V-Buck llama, with no guessing!
- The items offered are based on your account in order to apply dupe prevention.
- Dupe Prevention: Introduced in the v5.10 Patch, after the Llama has determined the item rarity and type of drop (Epic or Legendary Hero, Weapon, or Schematic) it will select an item from that category that is not already in your inventory or Collection Book. This applies to Epic, Legendary and Mythic Heroes, Epic and Legendary Schematics and Mythic Lead Survivors.
- Example: This means that if the Llama picks Legendary (rarity) Shotgun (type), for example, it will give you a Legendary Shotgun you do not already have. If you have all of the legendary Shotguns, it will give you a duplicate Shotgun. It will not pick from another category.
- Specific items can still be directly purchased with earnable in-game resources.
- All the fun of opening Llamas, and only the items you want!
When the update goes live, players will not be able to purchase multiple X-Ray Llamas at once because Epic wants to display the contents of the Llamas one at a time. However, Mini Llamas and event-based Llamas will still be treated as normal Llamas and will be able to be bought in bulk with currency earned in-game.
To celebrate the changes, Save The World players will each receive five free Llama Upgrade Tokens to use in the Item Shop. We’re not entirely sure when update 7.30 will be released, possibly this week, but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear any news.