Mullac said:
Loop Stricken said:
WHat. nobody's mentioned Warframe [https://warframe.com/] yet? I'm disappointed.
A third-person co-operative objective-based shooter, with space ninjas!
I was interested in that. Could you tell me how much of it is pay-to-win?
Though I haven't played since the pvp "dojo" was added, I'd argue that the main focus of the game is and was pve. Meaning buying power isn't nearly as much of an issue. The worst that can (and will) happen is that you get grouped up with someone who can easily solo whatever mission you're doing, meaning easy loot and xp for you.
Moving on to actual analysis of the payment model: getting new weapons and frames (classes) is reasonably do-able though grinding is definantly going to be involved at some point. I got some new weapons and a second frame within 1 week. There's some that supposedly can only be bought with cash but will occasionaly show up in alert missions anyway (more on those later). There's even a selection of weapons that can't be bought with in-game money nor through the cash shop and instead can only be found after alert missions. What you do have to look out for is the limited slots: you can have only 2 frames and 8 weapons unless you buy more. Personally I had no problem with that but my friend, who was collecting frames, obviously did.
Besides weapons and frames there's the usual suspects: cash-only colors for your frame, instantly finishing construction of new frames, xp boosts... None of which I cared about all that much but your mileage may vary.
Howeveeeeeeer if anything's gonna be a dealbreaker it's the orokin cores. Warframe's upgrade system is kind of obtuse but all you need to know is both weapons and frames level up as you use them. This level determines how many upgrades you can apply to them. Orokin cores, or "potatoes" as the warframe community lovingly likes to call them, are a cash-only item that can be used on a single frame or weapon and
double the number of upgrades that can be attached to that frame/weapon. Given that the amount of room for upgrades on any weapon or frame is rather limited, even at their max. level, this is a godsend and allows you to obtain power far beyond that of regular frames/weapons. The good news is they occasionally can be obtained from alert missions. The bad news is that only very rarely happens, as the devs are not idiots.
Alert missions are special missions that pop up at random moments on random planets. They'll stick around for 2 or 3 hours and if you haven't completed them by then, tough luck. Besides a sizeable wad of in-game cash they often also offer a "?" reward which is occasionaly something worthwile like a cash-only weapon. The important thing is that this "?" reward isn't a random loot roll but instead the same for everyone who completes the mission. So people made forum threads, twitter feeds, and all sorts of nonsense dedicated to keeping others informed on good alert rewards. Needless to say the white whale of these rewards is the fabled orokin core. I found the whole thing pretty fun the first few times something good popped up but it quickly felt like a cheap trick to artificially keep the game on people's mind 24/7.