Free games on Steam
<div class="IPBDescription">No, really.</div><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/news/5657/" target="_blank">http://store.steampowered.com/news/5657/</a>
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->Free To Play Games Have Arrived on Steam<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
<i>Press Releases - Valve
10:45</i>
Five F2P Launch Titles Offering Exclusive Content to Celebrate Launch
Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today introduced support for Free to Play (F2P) Games on Steam with the launch of five F2P games.
Available immediately, the launch titles are Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms (AVA).
Beginning tomorrow (Weds) with Spiral Knights and concluding Sunday with AVA, each of the five launch titles will offer exclusive in-game content to those who try the "F2P game of the day" on Steam. In game transactions in all of the titles will be supported by Steam's micro-transaction backend system that is available to Steamworks partners and currently used in Valve's Team Fortress 2.
"The introduction of Free to Play games is another example of the constant evolution of Steam," said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. "Free to Play games offer new game genres and game experiences for customers, while offering developers and publishers new revenue opportunities and the ability to reach customers in areas of the world where the traditional packaged goods model is less popular than F2P."
Specific details on the F2P games of the day and their exclusive in-game content will be made available in the coming days.
Steam is a leading platform for PC & Mac games and digital entertainment serving over 1,500 games to over 30 million active accounts worldwide. For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->Free To Play Games Have Arrived on Steam<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
<i>Press Releases - Valve
10:45</i>
Five F2P Launch Titles Offering Exclusive Content to Celebrate Launch
Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today introduced support for Free to Play (F2P) Games on Steam with the launch of five F2P games.
Available immediately, the launch titles are Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms (AVA).
Beginning tomorrow (Weds) with Spiral Knights and concluding Sunday with AVA, each of the five launch titles will offer exclusive in-game content to those who try the "F2P game of the day" on Steam. In game transactions in all of the titles will be supported by Steam's micro-transaction backend system that is available to Steamworks partners and currently used in Valve's Team Fortress 2.
"The introduction of Free to Play games is another example of the constant evolution of Steam," said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. "Free to Play games offer new game genres and game experiences for customers, while offering developers and publishers new revenue opportunities and the ability to reach customers in areas of the world where the traditional packaged goods model is less popular than F2P."
Specific details on the F2P games of the day and their exclusive in-game content will be made available in the coming days.
Steam is a leading platform for PC & Mac games and digital entertainment serving over 1,500 games to over 30 million active accounts worldwide. For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
Aside from Champions, the only thing on my radar is <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/99900" target="_blank">Spiral Knights</a> which release is also today. The fact they consolidate the logins for these is pretttty rad. If they could get APB Reloaded, Vindictus and the free Battlefields up there, I'd be set.
Spiral Knights. I tried it when it came out. It's sort of fun, but you quickly hit a snag: In order to enter a level, you have to pay ten energy. Energy slowly regenerates over a full day, but only up to 100. This means that if you use no energy for anything else, such as reviving yourself if you die or crafting stuff, you can enter ten levels per day. Levels are over really quick. What this boils down to is that the game crosses its arms and goes "no more today, come back later" before you can even figure out if you're into it or not. It's kind of a weird decision that seems aimed at PREVENTING people from getting addicted to the game, which I guess is laudable but makes no sense from a "we want everyone to play our game all the time" perspective.
It's also a bit weird how the crafting system is touted as an important part of the game, but crafting something actually PREVENTS you from playing because it consumes the energy you need for adventuring.
Of course you can buy more energy beyond the hard limit on free energy, but nobody pays for these games BEFORE they're hooked.
You know what this is? Remember those demos that you could play for sixty minutes and then they locked up and said "okay that's enough, you can either buy the full game or gtfo?" It's one of those demos.
I see no consolidation of logins. I still use my old login for Global Agenda, and I have to login after I launch the game, Steam doesn't do it for me. Which is good. If my login was tied to my Steam account I couldn't use my old, non-Steam account. That wouldn't be so fun.
By the way, does anyone else have a problem with the old (non-Steam) GA launcher? It couldn't contact its master server, so I couldn't launch the game. It's why I went and installed it on Steam, because it works perfectly there.
I was specifically talking about Spiral Knights, which it does. It still gives the option to log in through an alternate means to bypass any other problem. They even go the extra mile and combine up friends lists.
Global Agenda is fun for some quick PVP matches every now and then.
Champions Online... the character creation is really cool... but how do I get more tokens to unlock stuff... besides, you know... buying them?
Haven't tried the rest but the military one seems really bad and the perfect world one seems just to be a generic rip off.
For that matter, Global Agenda and Spiral Knights aren't even MMOs. The maximum party size in Spiral Knights is four. FOUR. Global Agenda ups the ante to 15v15 matches, but that's still just a regular FPS. Nothing "massive" about either of them.
Type 1 gave you free access to the game and charged you for these things you need to keep up.
Type 2 gave you a monthly paid subscription and made everything else free.
Seems like a simple enough solution.
The monthly sub gets you access to all premium content (classes, areas,races, etc) and also a monthly stipend for spending on premium items (potions and stuff).
For that matter, Global Agenda and Spiral Knights aren't even MMOs. The maximum party size in Spiral Knights is four. FOUR. Global Agenda ups the ante to 15v15 matches, but that's still just a regular FPS. Nothing "massive" about either of them.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
'Massive' means that's what you pay, nothing to do with player counts.
I mean... look at WoW. The most 'massive' action you see is everyone standing around Ironforge ###### about things. The actual game itself is typically 10-40 people.
Tribes 2 could support 128 players and this was in ###### 2001.
Still, it DOES feel like the scale of many MMOs has gone down. I know they want to promote the MMO equivalent of the core family, you and your buddies, but being part of a larger group of loosely organised players is fun too. The only game that rivals Planetside's insane 200-man cluster######s is Eve Online, which sadly suffers from the crippling condition known as "being Eve Online."
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<!--QuoteBegin-"About the Game"+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE ("About the Game")</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteEBegin-->War Inc. Battlezone is the most realistic, tactical, clan-based combat experience coupled with one of the deepest customization systems ever developed for an Online Shooter.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is it guys! This is what it's all been leading up to. We've reached the future and the apogee of realism in a tactical shooter game!
To be honest they should just rename them "Free to get your ass handed to you buy people who spend real money" since you cant really <i>get</i> anywhere without grinding for god knows how long to obtain something that other players could buy from the get go.
Spiral knights play model is particularly pointless in that you have to use "energy" to pay toll lifts to progress through the dungeons which means assuming you don't die (since that costs even more energy to respawn) you'll only get to play for about an hour a day if that since it takes a full 24 hours for your "energy" to recharge but of course you can spend real money to recharge it and bag a silly amount of in-game credits to buy any of the high level items from the shop since there is no level progression limiting you.
World of Tanks is also similar in that its free to play but you <i>REALLY</i> wont get anywhere without spending real money unless you fancy slogging through <b>literally</b> 4-5 months of grinding to get a tank that you could buy instantly.
In the beta you where given a set amount of gold every day that could be saved to buy specific premium tanks, converted into credits, exp or used to train your crew which really helped and gave a proper sense of progression but since the beta ended and you get none unless you buy it with real cash it really which really draws the game out to the point where you don't feel your getting anywhere at all.
I think the word you mean is <b>realistic</b>. It is the most realistic tactical shooter, after all.
Even if you're not willing to pay anything, World of Tanks is pretty okay for the first two tiers of tanks, maybe three if you're slightly masochist. After that you'll get pitted against teams filled with tanks (and artillery) that will one-shot you (from across the map in case of artillery) with little chance of you even damaging them.
It's grindy as hell. Purchasing a "premium subscription" doubles your income of in-game credits and xp, which is sorely needed to get anywhere. Also, you can't play with friends unless one of you has a premium subscription. So that's the money hook right there.
But the bigger problem is that it is very common to get matched against enemy tanks that completely outclass you. They will have guns that kill you in one or two hits, they will have armour that is almost completely impenetrable to your gun, and even if you score a penetrating hit they will have a lot of hitpoints to shrug it off. Be prepared to be utterly useless in most games you play for a long time. Twice as long if you stubbornly refuse to shell out for a premium subscription. And of course, getting destroyed constantly without doing noteworthy damage will also increase your repair bills while decreasing your income, further prolonging the tedious grind.
Or you could buy a Löwe premium tank. For the low, low price of 12500 gold (that's 50 euros for 14500 gold, with 2000 gold left over - enough for ten days of subscription, but five hundred gold short of one month's worth - feel free to buy more gold though!), you can get a tier 8 heavy tank that will earn you decent income so you can grind your way through the lower ranks<!--sizeo:1--><span style="font-size:8pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->*<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--> a little faster. Oh, also the community will hate you and waste no opportunity to call you a n00b and blame every defeat on you.
Unless you have a very high tolerance for tedium or are willing to dig deep into your pockets, don't bother with this "free" game.
<!--sizeo:1--><span style="font-size:8pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->* Note that premium tanks are placed completely outside the tech trees. They earn money, but they earn little exp, which is needed to unlock stuff for purchase. Even with a tier 8 premium tank, you will still need to grind your way through the entire tech tree with low level tanks to get any other tank.<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec-->
After the beta wipe (farewell ISU-152) I decided to give the US tank destroyer route a go and after buying the first little US tank destroyer available low and behold I was getting thrown into games with <b>Tier 4</b> Hetzers, A20's, and leopards !
They really messed up the game when they removed the gold allowance since you can no longer train your crew or buy permanent bolt-ons without investing an outrageous amount of time grinding and ironically by the time you've fully trained your crew you'd probably accumulated enough credits and exp to buy a better tank from the next tier rendering the point of training your crew useless since you'd then need to re-train them from scratch in that new tank.
Unless you spend real money of course.