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.

Pokémon GO - It was alright. It did what it was supposed to: you walk around, see pokémon 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 pokémon 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 pokéstops. 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.

I've played a number of F2P games with microtransactions and never spent a single red cent there.

If any given game is good, then the items you can buy are purely cosmetic and do not affect the gameplay in any way, shape or form. At that point you essentially decide if playing dress-up is worth it to you.

If a game is not good and the items do affect the gameplay, then it'll be evident immediately and so you can simply uninstall and forget.

Beware, though, if you lack discipline and are prone to compulsion. I knew people who spend ridiculous amounts of money buying utterly useless crap. It looks pathetic until you realize they can't actually afford it, and at that point it begins to look scary.

I've tried a few, and avoided many more due to strong allegations of being P2W.

Path of Exile - As far as I can tell, money can only be spent on cosmetic upgrades. That is, apart from a few $'s to expand your inventory space at some point in the game. The downside is that the only way to make your character really look cool is to find unique items with unique graphics and effects. Other than that you'll have to spend a few $'s to purchase weapon effects and so on. I think these are transferable between characters at least, but at the time the prices did come across as steep for what you get. Still, the gameplay is pretty badass and the world looks great. I only quit because the servers kept kicking me, no doubt due to my shaky internet connection.
[edit : $0 spent]

For some of these F2P games you have to ask yourself whether you will be willing to spend some money once you realize that you're enjoying the game and spending a lot of time with it. If not then some of these F2P games become unplayable imo. For example, if you really don't want to spend any money then Path of Exile is still a valid option, but something like Hearthstone is not. From the few months I spent with the game it seemed to me that you have to save up your gold from daily quests to pay for arena entries. If you instead want to go completely F2P and save up gold to buy the expansions then you won't be able to do arena games to get new packs and proper experience. And this will just make it that much harder to complete the dailies and save up for the expansions. You'll get frustrated and quit very quickly. Instead you have to purchase the expansions and use all your money for arena entries, or packs if you're feeling a bit lazy ;) Back then at least it felt like the expansions provided a good amount of bang for your buck. The singleplayer campaign of each expansion is fun and will take a lot of effort to beat while netting you a bunch of cards in the process.
[edit : 3 expansions bought can't remember how much in total]

Heroes of the storm - Really, really didn't like it. Apart from probably not being a fan of the moba gameplay, there seems to be a lot of paywalls : new character, new character skin, new character mount and I don't know what else. Probably like Hearthstone there are dailies you can do to unlock a lot of these without spending money, but I was too put off by the moba gameplay to stick with it and find out. I think I just prefer regular RTS.

Anno Online - Uhm no, just no. Can't see any reason to play this over one of the original anno games.

Team Fortress 2 - Criminally fun, and never spent a cent. Got it with the Orange box way back when. Unfortunately I had to stop playing because my internet connection couldn't keep up with the numerous gigantic updates :P But this was many years ago, not sure what is going on in the game atm.

Forge of Empires - This one I'm playing at the moment and having a very good time with. It's a long term city builder (Stone age to some Futuristic Age) with city builder mechanics superficially similar to Anno and the Impressions Games city builders. Though you can spend money to speed up the game, it will only allow you to speed up the game in short bursts, completely insignificant in the long run, that is, unless you want to spend many thousands of dollars. Instead it's the type of game in which you only check into your city 1,2 or perhaps even 3 times a day depending on how much you want/have to do. Over the literal months you'll build a small town into a big metropolis with various great buildings (the game's equivalent to wonders from civ). So steer clear if you're after a game you can finish in a week, or even a month.
Also, the gameplay doesn't allow for it to be P2W since you don't directly play against other players. All battles are against the games AI, including ones against another player's city defenses. Your city can get plundered by another player, but they can't do any damage to your city. Instead an attacking player can only hope to steal some resources from a production building that has finished its production. So, you only need to roughly time your productions and collections to essentially be immune against other players' attacks.
[edit : $10 spent though it wasn't necessary at all in retrospect and had little effect]
[edit 2 : current progress compared to early stage of game. In terms of max city size, the latter image if a little over 20% of the max size atm]

All of my games are free to play, none of them have micro transactions. Perfect!

Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances - slow, boring, resource income takes its sweet time, and you can only play for long periods of time if you take out your wallet.

the xbox version doesn't really do anything not even sure they even updated the game still for PC recently there was a market crash on the steam market with Team fotress 2 items but team fortress 2 has a gamemode MVM (Mann vs. Machine) as well where 6 players defend a bomb hatch from robots dropping a bomb in it or game over

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Mann_vs._Machine
also they have mine movies people make which some of them are pretty funny http://www.teamfortress.com/movies.php

it's pretty much if you played overwatch it's the same thing
Cosmetics there is a butt load in this game which people like

two things that cost
*one time payment ranked matches > there is not benefits other then looks but you do have to pay to play ranked it wasn't always like this which was added last year. i believe it cost $1-$5.00

*mvm Tour of Duty Ticket when you buy one you can compete to earn some cosmetics and parts (don't remember what the parts did) in the official Mann Up server, if you lose you get your ticket back. it's only consumed if you beat it
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you can play mvm without a ticket but you won't get anything other then a well done job for beating the level

how much i spent on this game...... i have no clue i spent and sold stuff to the point i don't know because you can scrap weapon and get parts for them and then you can trade those parts to other people and get keys in return to open up crates.



offtopic for blade and soul which is kinda interesting how they made the game and ya it's P2W but what they did was combined both PvE and PvP in the sam server type the only difference is what outfit you have. if you have a clan outfit you become PvP, but if you have a normal outfit then it's PvE although the game like a lot of F2p games are money hungry

I've played Gwent a bit but lost interest with a lot of the recent updates and changes.

I play Fire Emblem Heroes on android a lot. It's a really nice take on the series. It manages to streamline Fire Emblem without losing any of the charm that makes Fire Emblem great.
I haven't felt compelled to spend any money on it. If you play it a reasonable amount than you get enough orbs and feathers and other items to keep upgrading your characters and getting new ones.
My only complaint would be that the new character summoning seems to have been nerfed a little and I hardly ever get better than 3 star characters (whereas before I would sometimes get five 4 star characters in one summon), and I hardly ever get new characters even though there are still quite a few I don't have (but I do have about 80 - 90 unique characters so that's not too surprising)
I would definitely recommend it if you enjoy Fire Emblem or tactical RPGs in general.

I play TF2 a little and yet have not spent anything in it. You gradually get drops of different weapons, so eventually you will have most of the weapons you want without spending money. You can also craft weapons (from other weapons) without a premium account. The inventory space you get with a free account is smaller, but every Christmas they give one free Backpack Expander to everyone as a part of the gift-stuffed-stocking thing, so remember to log-in once during that time. Overall its structure seems pretty fair, your skills matter more than money. The only thing you would be missing are those fancy Hats and costumes and taunts/dances. But one purchase of any item turns your account into a premium and you will then be able to craft some cosmetic items too. A fun game overall. And the community is not that toxic.

What were the changes that turned you off? Just curious, as I've been intrigued with the idea of the single-player version of Gwent that's supposedly in the works.

Nothing particular really. Just around the end of the private beta they did a balancing patch which happened to wreck my main decks and I went from winning 75% or more of my matches to barely being able to win at all. They've changed it a lot more since then but I haven't really tried to get back into it.

Ah, so it's not something to worry about once it's in its (mostly) final form, as if one learns the game/gathers their decks at that point there shouldn't be any wide-reaching changes that will completely ruin your game (one would assume).

Thanks for the reply. :)

Yeah, assuming they get it to a decent final state then the changes shouldn't be quite as dramatic (though I believe online CCGs do get rebalanced a lot).
It's not bad on it's current state, I just couldn't be bothered to put the effort in again (I believe I'd just gotten the new Zelda around that time too so my gaming time went to that)

Well i had quite a journey in F2P lands so let me tell you a story:

1. If a game is published by Perfect World Entertainment run away.

Now that we are done with it my most noticable f2p journey start like this:

1. League of Legends - took me and my friends by storm and we really had a good time. I probably spent $250 or so on the game before I quited but it was fun and even without spending money .. it was fun.. as long as you had characters you enjoy playing.

2. Warframe - while the gameplay was fun it really couldnt carry the grind for me and seeing that the devs were just focusing on releasing mainly Primes instead of fresh heroes and weapons I just lost all interest( spent probably $100 for colours and inventory space since trading was just a chore that wasnt worth the time)

3. Firefall - It was fun... great fun actually with my favourite raid in there but alas the game never really made me want to spend money on it. Getting credits was easy and then you could trade them for Red Beans that were criminally cheap and you could get anything you want from the store and they never released anything new on said store(and people asked for more customization and more ways to spend money on the game)

4. Marvel Heroes - as far as f2p looters go this one is quite fun.. or used to if I have to follow the word of veterans about the recent update. I didnt play the game a lot(compared to other mentions) but still dropped a tener to get a Team-up quickly and another stash.

5. Planetside 2 - My last journey.. was a blast! Met cool people, had fun nights and good luck finding another MMOFPS with such scale. Dropped $35 and could go higher but at the end they went with stupid new Implant system that impacts the gameplay and you either drop money for almost no gain or grind your ass off... Yeah.. no


Honorable mentions:

Dota 2 - "You have spent approximately $107.01 USD in the game" - Good thing Steam tracks that.. though most of the money were spent on tickets for small tournaments because it was relatively easy to get drops and profit from the whole system though I stopped playing long before they changed drop rates.

My Little Pony(Android) - Well I enjoyed the show and the game was a good fun(though its a hell for free users after the 1st week). While Gameloft were greedy(but got $100 from me over the course of 18 months), after they were bought out things went to worse.. really really worse with no chance to get new stuff unless you got deep deep pockets. After the Valentine event this year I just uninstalled my game and no clue was my save on the cloud or not.


Now a lot of people will say that those money were wasted but nah but then I ask "Well do you keep playing all the games you buy or you move on? "

So if you like a F2P game and got the means to show support do it if you think its worth it.

The only such game I've I played (quite a lot) was Lord of the Rings Online, several years ago, as it ran (and reportedly still runs) well under wine, and I just loved the idea of exploring that world. The first part of the game is completely playable for free (basically Hobbiton (plus other starting race areas), Bree, and then the region around weathertop). It's a lot of fun running around as a Hobbit, delivering pies and so on, and they really brought a lot of extremely memorable locations to life (the Old Forest for example still ranks as one of the most amazing forests I've seen in any game, with only the forest outside Flotsam from Witcher 2 coming close). Further regions have the main storyline quest playable, while access to all side quests in a region (as well as several near-essential skills) can be bought for points which you can either buy or earn in game, where earning them in game starts being infeasible after at most two regions, due to the excessive grind involved in it all.

I bought a single pack of points during one of the regular sales, which - with some judicious rationing of non-essential regions where I only did the main quest (and only buying regions when they were discounted the most) - got me most of the way to Rohan, which at that point was as far as the story had unfolded. I'd already gotten my money's worth of entertainment from the starting regions when I bought those points, and found the purchase to be totally worth it for Moria, which was not only humongous, but also very well done.

The grind got excessively bad in later regions, though - not just for points, but also for regular equipment - so that dis-incentivized making any further purchases. When they added a region where you wouldn't even be able to play the main quest without buying the region, near the same time as putting in a complete skill-tree overhaul which made my build no longer soloable, that was the end of that game for me.

Sorry, haven't really played any free-to-play titles. The closest thing, I think, is that one time I tried stapling my own thumb.