I love playing video games. Some have great single player stories, other have nice graphics, require tactics and some have great online opportunities. I spend several evenings a week chatting to friends online (both typing and voice) while playing video-games together. It's a big part of my social life. (Even though non-gamers think it's something antisocial. Yet when you ask them what they did in the evening, they watched tv for hours...)
Anyway the last few years there is a certain trend in the PC gaming industry. The games themselves are free and you can buy in-game purchases to enhance your experience. The reason is that people don't always want to put down 50€-60$ for a game they haven't tried (unless it's a sequel to a popular game) and with piracy they lose some income. When they make a game free to play, they have a much bigger audience. Also, spenders tend to spend more on a game with in-game purchases than a one-time fee and with the bigger audience they got, they get more revenue.
Largely there are three types of free games with in-game purchases.
- The worst ones are the ones called "pay-to-win". It basicly means that the only way to play this game on a normal level is to pay some money. Either you are stuck with basics or need to do the same thing over and over for 2 years to catch up with someone who pays 5$.
- Free to play but some grinding: This usually means that there is an in-game currency that you earn by playing and one you get with money. You can speed things up by spending real money, but if you like the game and put some hours in it, it's certainly doable for free as well and you hardly miss anything the payers do.
- The pay for cosmetics: These games don't give any (or hardly any) advantages if you pay with money. Instead money gives skins, cosmetic items, ... for your character so it looks different. Gameplay stays the same.
For frugal people this trend is a good thing. We can play more games for free :-) And if it's a really good game, I don't even mind sponsoring the company by buying something in-game but I got to admit it will be less than what spenders buy.
So, here is a list of a few games I play/played that I really enjoyed that were completely free and not pay2win. Feel free to add your own. There are also a lot of smaller games on facebook, websites, ... I'm not going to list them here, but perhaps we should add them later or make a different thread for that.
The games in no particular order:
"Grind" games:
- War thunder: Flying WW2 planes and trying to shoot other players down or bomb objectives. You start with small planes with small guns, slowly you get bigger planes with bigger guns. You are always matched against people with similar planes. Really fun game, great graphics. Has both arcade mode and more realistic modes.
- Lotro: rather big grind without spending at least a bit of money, but it's a MMORPG located in middle earth. Very friendly community as well.
- Planetside 2: Huge MMO shooter. You have 3 planets with the 3 factions on each. You try to capture parts and gain more ground that way. The game keeps continuing if you go to bed so when you log in again the territories might have changed sides a lot of times. Quite nice game although a bit overwhelming at first.
- Warframe: co-op shooter where you and friends/random teammates kill waves of alien-like creatures. Your character shoots with normal weapons, fights with a big blade and has some epic skills depening on the type (invisible, dash forward, freeze everyone, ...)
- Airmech: indie game on steam. Futuristic kinda tower defense game where you build tanks, units, ... to protect and push bases. Once you destroy the enemies main base you win.
- Heartstone: Blizzard's latest pc card game. It just went into open beta for the US and should be available for EU/asia soon as well. The top 100 players during closed beta were people who hadn't bought any cards with real money yet. It's based on the warcraft's lore but even without that you can easily play it. It plays a bit like magic the gathering, although less complicated.
Free games with cosmetics:
- Team fortress 2: very fun shooter on steam. Different game modes. Basicly you only pay real money for hats :D Different types of characters you can play: healing, building turrets, rocketeer, guy with heavy machine gun, spy, ...
- League of Legends: the most popular game at the moment. It's a moba game. Purpose is to destroy the enemy base. You do this by playing champions who aid the small waves of footfolk coming out of both bases. Warning: the community is rather toxic and full of complainypants. Fun game though. Real money is almost only used for cosmetic skins. You also gain points by playing games with which you unlock new champs.
Oldies for nostalgia that became free to play:
- Red Alert, tiberian sun, command and conquer -> legally free since a couple of years. If you are nostalgic to play them again
- (Age of Empires 2 Forgotten empire mod) -> the game itself still isn't free I think but if you have it lying around, the free mod makes it able to put unit limit to 1000, bigger screen resolution, new factions, ... Still fun to play with friends (over tunggle for example).
