I am still pressing forward with The First Descendant, which does have decent enough combat and buildcrafting I’ve found, for what it lacks in story and mission diversity.
But the more I play the more I keep getting slammed in the face with things I hate, namely all of which have to do with microtransactions. And ones pulled directly from the game its emulating in essentially every single way, Warframe.
The problem here is that The First Descendant has taken almost every bad microtransaction concept from Warframe and made them more expensive, and worse. Every day I find some new absurd thing the game has monetized, and while yes, there are paths to grind out much of this, they make it so absurdly frustrating a lot of the time that you’re just going to want to throw in the towel and pay. Which is of course, the point.
I am not anti-microtransactions in free-to-play games. I mean, they need some, or the game couldn’t exist at all. But that’s usually optional cosmetics, and this is that and way, way more. We have:
- Paid Descendants, just buying the character themselves, for $3-6 on average, skipping potentially dozens of hours of grinding.
- Common skins that are nothing but recolors for existing skins.
- Premium skins that sell often sell hair and makeup separately, and universal skins have to be rebought for each character.
- Ultimate skins that can run for $100 and require an even more insane level of grinding and RNG to assemble.
- Paint that does not work on free skins, and are one-time use.
- Limited Descendant slots so you have to purchase more to keep expanding your collection without “dismissing” any.
- A battle pass that does not contain any character skins at all.
- The game putting “build timers” on the things you have grinded for, which can be hours to days, unless you pay to skip the wait.
- Paid boosts for XP, gold acquisition, weapon mastery, shard generation.
- Paid materials for crafting costs.
Again, you will indeed find almost all of these microtransactions inside Warframe, but many here are more expensive and/or give you less for the value. This is also something that turned me off from Warframe, but here it’s just even more transparently terrible and I very much do not like a game that throws up annoying roadblocks at every turn in order to get you to open your wallet to avoid them.
At this point I have few problems paying $10-20 for a cosmetic skin in a free-to-play game if I’m really digging it or a specific character I’m using. But a game that decreases its drop rates for the sake of saying you can “grind” twenty hours for something you could just buy for $6 rubs me the wrong way. And so does doing that grind and being hit with a days-long wait timer unless you pay to remove it. It’s gross.
Again, it’s Warframe, but it’s definitely worse and it definitely has not earned the goodwill to monetize to this extreme level, offering players so little in return. It may end up making me throw in the towel altogether depend on how this continues to feel as the game presses on.
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