"Free to Play" Games with Microtransactions

[DaCosta]

After reading a bad preview on Destiny 2, I finally decided to try out Warframe, which appears to be a very well regarded game in the same style, plus it's free. It got me thinking about free to play games. A lot of people, me included, have an aversion to them. There's this fear of playing a subpar version of a game, made so intentionally, in order to squeeze money out of you. But they're not all like that, surely, there are good ones, and considering they are meant to be free, there's nothing keeping me from trying them out.

Have you played any "free to play" games? Were any of them good? Were the microtransaction elements of the games fair? Did you pay for anything? Do you feel compelled to give the devs some money if you like the game?


The only ones I've played were:

Hearthstone - I never got into card games in real life, partly because of how expensive it seemed, partly because there weren't many people to play with, and partly because it had a gazillion rules and things to remember about all the cards. The online card game gave me someone new to play against after just a 30s wait, the computer manages all the rules for me so I don't have to worry if I'm playing it wrong, and it's free. It certainly helped that the game was very beginner friendly at teaching me how to play, and I loved the presentation. As long as you logged in every few days and completed the missions the game gives, you could buy a new card pack with that amount of gold. It'd probably add up to 3 or 4 packs per week. I never paid anything and I felt like I was doing pretty well at the game with the cards I had. However, there were a few cards I did wish I owned and had to do without; after a couple of years and another 10 expansions or something, I could see that feeling being exacerbated. From what I hear the game feels more pay-to-win nowadays.

Pok?mon GO - It was alright. It did what it was supposed to: you walk around, see pok?mon around you, and you can try to capture them. That's pretty much it. It's the sort of game you play on your phone that is meant to sit idle most of the time and every once in a while you pull out the phone, do a couple of things in it, then go back to what you were doing previously. I played it for about a week during the height of its popularity and it certainly provided some entertainment for the low price of nothing. I imagine nowadays, when you no longer can go to a pok?mon gym at any time of day and meet a dozen new people there, it won't be as fun. I didn't see much of a reason for a casual player such as myself to pay for anything in it. A more hardcore player, on the other hand, will probably need to pay some money to keep progressing at a steady pace. Or if you live far away from any pok?stops. My big gripe with it had nothing do with game design though, but its app design. It had to be on the foreground at all times, this means you can't really listen to music while you're walking around with it. Having to chose between the game and listening to music when going somewhere, I chose music. If the app could be run in the background, maybe I'd still play it occasionally today.

 

[CaitSeith]

The Simpsons: Tapped Out (iPhone) - Springfield themed city-building. It has in-game currency that you have to farm by tapping the buildings you created every X period of time and building stuff can take hours or even days. Then there is premium currency that it can be exchanged for in-game currency or it's even required for some characters or buildings. It's not worth the time.

Dungeon Keeper Mobile (iPhone) - Not a good tower defense game. The currencies are rocks, gold and gems (the two former come from mines you have to tap every X period of time, and the later are premium). Opening passages and building can take hours or even days. You don't defend against heroes, but only against other players (and you don't play a part of it, you just can see a replay of what happened). It's just not worth the time.

Pokemon Picross (3DS) - Solve the puzzle to catch a Pokemon. Equipped Pokemon have effects that make the puzzles easier to solve. You are severely limited by the paywalls (new areas require premium currency to become accessible, and you have an energy meter on how many squares you can mark). Despite that, I discovered that I'm addicted to Picross. I also discovered that, unlike the previous games, there is a ceiling of how much you can pay with your microtransactions in total ($40). After that, you can't pay anymore; instead you get 5,000 units of premium currency for free daily (effectively eliminating any paywall in the game). Worth your time if you are into puzzle games (and it doesn't require internet connection to play)

Falling London (iPhone) - Gothic text adventure game full of dark-weird comedy. You have a limited number of actions, and you have to wait to recover before being able to continue. Each action has a success rate, which depends on one of your attribute's levels (failing usually increases your attribute). Not bad, if you like that genre.

Fallout Shelter (iPhone) - Shelter building game. It's better than The Simpsons in the sense that building rooms is instantaneous. Each room provides a resource that you must farm by tapping every X period of time; but can be speed up by adding more people to the room. You can also equip your dwellers and send them to the wasteland for better weapons and clothes to improve their efficiency. Pretty fun, I have heard they added more features and it's exclusively single-player (no other player's invasion non-sense).

Best Fiends Forever (iPhone) - A Cookie Clicker clone without the charming weirdness of the original. Well graphically it looks good and cute (little bugs killing slugs while moving from place to place). You get coins and use them to level up your bugs, so they hit harder; or acquire special attacks that you can trigger to do lots of damage). Your only real roadblock are the bosses (you have limited time to finish the battle or you can't progress). At some point not even the special attacks are enough against the bosses; so the game can send you back to the beginning, but you can buy special artifacts that ridicuosly increase your damage. Not bad, but not so sure to be worth my time.

Let It Die (PS4) - A post-apocaliptic rogue-like action game with lots of personality. This game is a time sink. The game is pretty much like the pulp magazines that you find there: a pretty fun experience based on shock value that doesn't improve your life in any way; which is a really good deal for something free. Create your character, and try to climb the randomly-generated tower. The combat reminds me a little of Dark Souls (just because it's 3rd person with swappable weapons and shoulder buttons for attacking), but that's giving it too much credit. If you die, you get to choose to revive right there by paying a token (which you can get in quests or by paying about $0.75) or you create a new character (you can recover your old character, but you have to find it where you died and kill it first). They added one free revive per day, so it's an even better deal. If you have lots of free time in your hands, you can do much worse than this.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that except for Let It Die (and Pokemon Picross after getting rid of the paywalls), all these games are designed to be played in a casual manner (aka, sessions of 5 to 10 minutes), because of the forced wait times. Longer sessions require paying up.

 

[sanquin]

Well, there is one that's free to play for the base game NOW. Though I bought it when it first came out. Namely GW2. It's not really fully f2p of course. You have to buy the expansions to get to the endgame stuff properly. But still, the base game is apparently f2p now and despite it's flaws it's still a very good MMO.

Another one I can think of is Planetside 2. There are of course some guns that are just more powerful than the base one. And you do need to play for many hours to unlock stuff. But even with the base guns for each class you won't be left behind. You can make plenty of kills and help with the objectives just fine. It's more a matter of skill and knowledge whether you do well or not.

Overall, I don't let the f2p model hold me back from at least playing a game for a week or two. It's free after all. And if I hit a paywall or get bored, I can just stop. Nothing wasted but time, which is the whole point of playing games in the first place.

 

[DoPo]

However, there were a few cards I did wish I owned and had to do without; after a couple of years and another 10 expansions or something, I could see that feeling being exacerbated. From what I hear the game feels more pay-to-win nowadays.

I haven't played it in a couple of years, but the best thing about Hearthstone I believe is the arena mode. There it doesn't matter what your library has, so you are on equal footing with your opponents. Well, down to some luck, sure, but at least it's not pay to win. Also, if you can play well, then you can just play arena all the time, since you need only a few wins (was it 3?) to refund your buy-in gold.

However, I can definitely see how the game would be considered "pay to win", although that might be a bit abusing the term. Technically you can just play and get cards, however, at the same time you also need to devote a lot of time to do that. That's why I think arena is better - you don't really need to devote that much time, nor do you need to spend money.

Fallout Shelter (iPhone) - Shelter building game. It's better than The Simpsons in the sense that building rooms is instantaneous. Each room provides a resource that you must farm by tapping every X period of time; but can be speed up by adding more people to the room. You can also equip your dwellers and send them to the wasteland for better weapons and clothes to improve their efficiency. Pretty fun, I have heard they added more features and it's exclusively single-player (no other player's invasion non-sense).

I played it on my Android phone and it was alright. It honestly got stale after a while as you don't really have that much to do - assign people to do tasks and then come back every so often to check on them. Then I decided to set myself a goal - EUGENICS! I was going to change the face of the Earth once and for all. The game lets you assign dwellers into couples and they produce babies - the skin tone of the baby is based on the skin tone of the parents. So, I decided to make everybody black using selective breeding. All white people in the vault were assigned to lower priority jobs and when the vault was getting close to overfilling, they were sent to the wastes to die. My plan was to fill the vault with only black people who have maxed out all their stats.

Unfortunately, at some point the save got corrupted or something and wouldn't load any more. After googling, I found that other people had the same problem and there was no solution as of that time. Apparently, it was down to Bethesda to patch the game. After a couple of weeks, the thing still didn't work, so I just uninstalled the game. After two more months I tried again just to see if it was fixed but it wasn't. I haven't touched the game since.

OT: Path of Exile - it's probably one of the best free to play games out there. It can definitely be used as a role model for how to do it right. It's a very good spiritual successor of Diablo 2 but the depth of the builds is truly astonishing. The game gets constant expansions - some small, some big but they all tend to be very good. The vast majority of things you can pay for are cosmetics, stuff like animal companions (they serve no gameplay purpose), weapon/armour skins, or skill skins (these can be quite awesome). There are only three actual advantage you can pay for
- stash space - it's a nice to have but not a requirement. It allows you to store more stuff (duh) but you can also be constantly trading with other players and thus get rid of the equipment that way. I know that a lot of people do that. Even then, the game is free, so you can make mule characters or accounts, if you really want to hold on to a lot of stuff
- guild stash - it's slightly more relevant, if you're in a guild. Considering you don't really need to, you can pretty much ignore that. When I played with my friends, we made a guild so we could party up easier. We eventually bought regular stash tabs and used the "change" from that to get guild stash just so we could trade items easier. It's by no means mandatory, though.
- guild member slots - guilds start off with 30 people limit. Me and my friends never actually bumped into that. Again, it's only relevant if you're in a guild and even then, only if it's a big enough one.

Overall, you can get hundreds of hours without paying a penny and you won't miss out on anything. The paid features are not essential at all to the enjoyment of the game.

 

[wings012]

I refuse to spend a dime on F2P games in general. Unless they have an 'unlock everything that impacts gameplay forever' for 60USD or something along the lines of that and I really love the fucking game. Otherwise it's a bit of a ripoff.

Mobile games are fucking sadness in the F2P department. I play a few but I would rather not talk about them. Exploitative gambling cancer that I put up with cause I like the core franchises and have friends that play them.

As far as PC games go - I've tried a bunch.

Hawken - I enjoyed the game early on, but lack of updates and shrinking player base kinda killed it. No idea if it is even still up. I enjoyed my fast paced robot shooty action.

Mechwarrior Online - A game I keep going back to, despite the absolute lack of new maps... Recently they advanced the timeline so there's more toys to play with. The grind is pretty real if you want optimized mechs, and it can get hard to try a variety of things unless you get a flexible chassis. Timberwolves allowed me to try my hand at all sorts of builds so those were a great boon after I got tired of light mechs and found the assaults I bought to be very lacking.

Robocraft - Yes I have a mech fetish. I had a lot of fun with this, figuring out all sorts of robot builds. They had a tiered progression system where mechs were matched based on what level of technology was put in. So it was vaguely well balanced. But you could basically 'overtier' by bringing high tier tech down to low tiers - but at the cost of using a lot less blocks in your build(I sure loved my plasma darts). I personally enjoyed that mechanic and it made mid tiers loads of fun with a larger variance of builds - instead of super optimized samebuilds at the top tier. But people kept bitching, so they got rid of that system and the devs just kept scrambling the game mechanics to the point it's no longer recognizable from the early days. If MWO had the problem of updates not being significant enough, this game has the problem of updates going way too ham crazy. I got bored of it afterwards but I heard now you can only get gear from a loot box system? Previously you just bought shit from a shop. Lootboxes are such absolute cancer. You can basically pop onto steam and see people with hundreds of hours played lambasting the shit out of the game. Not really interested in going back. Also despite being up for so damn long they still have the gall to leave the Early Access status on.

Tribes Ascend - I played the Tribes Vengeance beta back in the day and had loads of fun. So I gave this a shot. I think there was potential in there somewhere but the game was largely neglected. Horrible ping kinda killed it for me and it was ultimately abandoned by its developers in favour of Smite anyway.

Heroes of the Storm - I'm not a fan of MOBAs in general. I played them in the days of Warcraft 3 modding before they earned that name, and basically got tired of the genre when DoTA Allstars came out and introduced all that item crafting recipe bullshit which I hated. Also mechanics like denying kills via friendly fire, last hitting and shit are just crap I hate and felt were just elements that were part of the WC3 engine that they unnecessarily kept on as game mechanics. HotS does away with all that nonsense, has a nice talent system and lets me focus on just positioning and smacking shit rather than worrying about the next cake to bake. Shorter more aggressive games. I kinda like HotS and I play it on and off. I did a bunch of events they held which gave me a huge roster of free heroes to work with on top of the ones I bought and the ones in free rotation. Plenty of gold too from dailies.

 

[Wrex Brogan]

Funnily enough, Warframe is the F2P game that I've played - and it's a... hot and cold game for me. I played it for something like, 4 years, since the gameplay was always solid (if a bit unbalanced with all the power creep and sheer number of weapons/frames these days), the lore was rather interesting and the fact that there wasn't really any downside to not buying anything outside the limited weapon and frame slots. Hell, even their cosmetics weren't too bad - I ended up putting a decent amount of money into the microtransactions of the game anyway since, well, I just liked it so much, and the fact that even 20-30 bucks worth of Platinum could still get you quite a bit of gear. And while I never took advantage of it, the fact that the in-game player market is also run by Platinum means you can make a decent bit of cash if you're lucky with part or mod drops - don't even need to spend a dime on the game.

That said, as good as they have been with the microtransactions, they have been a bit bullshit with them in regards to the more RNG-based elements of the game. The Mod Packs I know have been widely criticized from day one, since 90 platinum (about 5 bucks) for 5 randomly generated mods in a game where there's over a thousand gets a bit bullshit, especially when considering that a lot of the best mods don't even drop in the mod packs (not that they tell you, of course). Likewise the Prime Vault - Primes in game have always been RNG-locked and a long grind to acquire, but the latest changes to the Prime grind have put them behind bigger and bigger walls, and for people who don't want to sit in trade chat trying to find someone who isn't gouging prices, it costs 90+ dollars to get ahold of them (and some in-game currency, but there's no way to desperate the Primes and the Platinum). And when the in-game drop rates get too low while the 'micro' transactions start costing the price of a full game, well... let's just say I get a little salty.

Like, shit, when I grinded for my first Braton Prime it took me something like 30 missions with the old key system. With the Relic System it's taken me something like 100 missions total and I'm still missing some pieces - and new Prime Warframes have even lower drop-rates than the weapon parts I'm missing! C'mon DE, I know money is nice and all but fucking drop rates this badly so more people buy your stupid Prime Packs is just ridiculous.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Hawken - a fun little multiplayer game, and I mean little, there were only like 3 game modes.

I thought that the free to play elements were mostly fine. After playing like 5 matches I had enough in-game currency to buy 2 more mechs and start upgrading them. The starting mech, while ugly, is also really well balanced, and would often times score very high. It's kind of a jack of all trades thing where it's decently fast, decently powerful, and has an ok health pool, but doesn't excel at anything, while also being very easy to use.

Some of the upgrades get ridiculously expensive though, and start getting kind of OP at the end of the upgrade trees. I have no idea how people grind out enough in-game currency to afford them considering how few game modes there are. I'm willing to bet there isn't a single person who earned the high tier upgrades, they just bought them.

So yeah, it's a fun distraction worth playing if you're craving a multiplayer game but know you'll probably only actually want to play it for a couple of weeks before you remember you hate human interaction and want to go back to playing whatever 80 hour RPG you were playing earlier.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Shadowverse, fun card game with beautiful artwork, have not spent one cent on it yet have tons of cards and decks. They're very generous with their free packs and offer you a lot of in-game ways of earning currency by playing.

 

[Tanis]

Pokemon Shuffle:
You get a turn every 25min, with a max of 5 before you have to use one to get the countdown started again.

It's actually a pretty fun 'connect 3' type of game...but, yeah.

I've gotten fairly far into the game without paying any money, though I could have gotten a LOT farther if I had.

 

[CaitSeith]

Pokemon Shuffle:
You get a turn every 25min, with a max of 5 before you have to use one to get the countdown started again.

It's actually a pretty fun 'connect 3' type of game...but, yeah.

I've gotten fairly far into the game without paying any money, though I could have gotten a LOT farther if I had.

Oh, I forgot that one too. I prefer Picross over Shuffle because the later requires Internet connection to even start playing.

 

[StatusNil]

I don't play them. They violate a fundamental rule of games, called "The Magic Circle" by some. Meaning the game should not be trying to reach for your real world wallet while you're inside the circle. And no good design choice ever came from the deceptively named F2P model.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I tried Firefall. Wasn't into it. Played Star Wars: The Old Republic until I got bored and frustrated with the paywalls.

 

[laggyteabag]

I think you'll be hard pressed to find a person who has never played a F2P game. A fair few of the most played games in the world are Free 2 Play.

Making a decent F2P game isn't hard. You just need to make sure that the microtransactions are somethng along the lines of:
XP Boots, Cosmetic Items, Things that can be easy enough to obtained through gameplay, and nothing that effects gameplay that is also microtransation exclusive.

I play a lot of Heroes of the Storm, and not once have I ever felt compelled to spend any money on that game. Microtransactions are limited to Heroes (which you can buy with in game currency), loot chests (which you can earn very easily), and XP Boosts (which also come in loot chests).

Personally, I avoid games with hard paywalls that ask you to pay X to proceed, or those with what I call "soft paywalls", which give you the impression that you can advance, but in reality, the obstacle is far too hard without either spending an insane amount of time grinding, or spending some amount of money on a boost, or whatever.

I also avoid blatant Pay 2 Win games. I once played a game called Warface, which was a F2P military shooter, and the game was okay, until I realised that you could buy (only with $$$) a helmet that could make you immune to a single headshot, as well as being better than every single piece of non-premium armour. I dropped the game then and there.

 

[squid5580]

I am playing Orcs Must Die Unchained and it is great for a F2P game. Heroes are cheap enough. You should be able to unlock one every 3 days just from dailies. Upgrading traps is more expensive but as far as I can tell you can't pay for them with real money anyways. I haven't hit a paywall yet after 2 weeks (give or take). I got a bunch of premium currency with PS+ for free (technically not I know) that I haven't used and already unlocked 5 heroes. Would be more if I hadn't used the currency on traps instead.

I would toss them some $$$$ but frankly there is nothing I can justify spending it on right now. There is skins but since there is so many characters throwing money on 1 doesn't seem right since you get rewarded for beating levels with each character. And like I said unlocking characters with the reward currency is fast and easy paying for them with premium is a waste and wouldn't feel like I earned them.

 

[sageoftruth]

I've got that same aversion, so the only one I can offer is Ghost Trick, and it's only "Free to Play" because the first level is free and you purchase the rest. That's my kind of Free to Play, since the amount you can spend on it has a cap, and all you're paying for is the game itself, just like when buying it straight.

 

[sXeth]

Smite : Good enough game, but you got to use a fairly limited selection of heroes if you stuck to the free side. MOBA balance ends to leap about a lot, but you never can quite shake the sense that maybe those heroes you can't play are just slightly better overall. Which could be a false illusion based on not being able to get firsthand knowledge of them, or not.

Paladins : Well at its core its basically the same game as Overwatch. Except you can only play as a pittance of Heroes. Which kind of messes up trying to play coherent team comps. At least as far as I could tell, you were locked into matches vs bots until you unlocked the Competitive mode too, which required experience progression on more heroes then were available free. Probably one of the messiest ones I've encountered.

Planetside 2 : Playable as a free game, but get used to being the pathetic grunt on the field. Most of your better tools and vehicles are severely limited for free players or outright locked.


Crossout - I doubt you can get much fun out of this without shelling out a noticeable investment, or playing the absolute trash tier of having 1-2 weapon options (not that there's more then 4 or 5 anyways) and garbage cars. If you were willing to drop an initial investment to get desirable loot, and have the time to decipher their trading system, you might manage to elevate yourself to parity.


Let It Die - I got bored of the 3 or 4 enemies and limited level design before I hit any real impedance that required using the MTs. I guess thats a good thing? Let It Die does feature a variation of PvP, and while I never delved into them, the MTs do give you the potential to have more base defenders, which is a key factor in the PvP, which is a red flag.


Evolve (2.0) - Putting aside its ill fated original version, this one wasn't bad. You could play the core game for free, and while you could debate that the locked heroes were more powerful, I don't recall the prices being outrageous, and the currency came at a reasonable rate from regular pay. The development plug was pulled (I think you can still play though), so no content is forthcoming.


Paragon - Paragon bucks the MOBA trend and has all the heroes on deck for free (a few require a mild grind to unlock that goes by quickly, ideally practicing against bots or whatever to get the hang of things). There is some gameplay impact to be had from the MTs, as you can buy rep boosts, xp boosts, and card packs., the prior two which work in tandem with gameplay to buy card packs (which can be gained with reputation XP from playing or MTs). It was largely possible to do the card thing without paying, as you could earn chests by playing and so on, and recycle unwanted cards to craft others. The whole system around that's changing in August, so no idea then. Cosmetics were an oddball thing, as there were both directly purchasable skins and emotes, or you could buy (or win in gameplay) loot crates that awarded them at random, sometimes including variations not available for direct buy.


Fortnite - Fortnite isn't free to play until 2018, currently in Early Access if you shell for a 40 dollar (I think in US) founder pack. There's a clear barrier to progression in the RPG elements unless you delve into buying the MTs. However, where people are hitting this barrier is also where the game enters "Still in development", as the regions involved are full of placeholder missions and reused assets rather then their final forms. So there's a possibility that the structure to enable progression just hasn't been put in properly yet. Progression aside, the core gameplay loop is available in the standard model. You can play missions with your friends or PUGs as much as you want, its just the loot wheel and ever inflating numbers that are barricaded as you go on. The main questline will throw upgraded versions of the 4 standard classes and a reasonable selection of firearm schematics (which let you craft new copies of weapons beyond what you scavenge), but if you want one of the 8-10 variations of your class or a more oddball or top tier variant, you need to buy in to the RNG loot system (though you do accrue a moderate fund of the games currency by completing questlines, and daily-type missions)

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Twas a long long time ago, but Ran Online.

Wonder whatever happened to it?