I have an unhealthy amount of love for Free to Play games. It has something to do with my love for content. As has been discussed I’m approaching something like 300 PC games between Steam, Desura, and GoG. That I can get still more stuff for free is kind of amazing. So I wanted to share some of this nonsense with you.
Yes, that IS a gun in my pants. My giant, horrifying robot pants
Mechwarrior Online is pretty great. This may be a thing you’ve heard before. Yes, it does offer the same focus on premium content that other, similar games do, but great efforts are put forth to make the game at least feel fair. By the end of your first twenty games or so you’ve acquired more than enough of the in-game currency to get your very own giant walking pile of cannons, and the starter robots are nothing to sneeze at. The game really exists in two parts; the mech fights and the building. Really only one of those is behind any kind of time or pay wall. You can play as much as you want, it’s the customization that gets pricey.
Roughly six seconds after this the game becomes infuriating.
You Have to Win the Game is something I’ve talked about before on the podcast, and streamed, but it’s still awesome and you should still be trying it out. A very lovely man at Gearbox has been putting it out, along with a level editor. it’s a great little masocore platformer with some interesting story bits to discover along the way, and one of those things that baffles me when I try to do things like sell books online for a dollar. But YHWG suffers from the same sort of problem Slender, or SCP or even the amazing Stanley Parable do; these games are going to lack content. YHWG is pretty robust, but Stanley can be finished in about half an hour. It’s an obvious statement, but still a bummer.
I think the key of the Freemium title is working with in a fairly limited set of expectations for content. You might have a massive, time-sucking experience like Planetside, Mechwarrior, Maple Story, or Fallen Earth, but they’ll all be burdened with trappings of buyable content, and some of them may misstep in the way War Z did by offering buyable content that’s simply..dumb. No Mechwarrior, I don’t want to buy fuzzy dice for my mech. On the other hand you’ll find an experience that’s over in twenty minutes and leaves you longing for more.
So what’s the big idea behind all of this? Besides saying some free games are ok and giving you a bunch of links? Well, I could have some sort of deep, vaguely philosophical rationale for all of this, but I’ve already talked about value in gaming quasi recently. My real purpose in all of this is to introduce you to the majesty of Frog Fractions.
Frog Fractions is something you should play. It isn’t that it’s a free game, or perhaps the most brilliant sendup of the old edutainment games of my childhood, it’s that this game could only possibly exist as a thing that you play in your browser. Frog Fractions’ beauty is that you have no idea what’s coming until after you’ve gotten twenty minutes or so into the game. Retail products can’t work that way. I’m not going to pay sixty dollars for a game that suddenly reinvents itself and not feel cheated (looking at you, Brutal Legend). In a free game? It’s a fantastic, glorious surprise. And that’s what you should look for in your free content. Not a Call of Duty you don’t have to pay for, or a World of Warcraft that doesn’t involve making a contract with Blizzard, but something new. Something no one in their right mind would ever take a gamble on. Because sometimes that’s pretty rad.
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