Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - 10 Free Games With Terrible Pay To Win Mechanics
Intro
it costs money to make games, so when games are free, we know that there's going to be something to make money from in them, like microtransactions. And we don't like any of that, but not all of them are overdue, but today we're going to talk about the ones that do overdo.
Warface
Starting off at number 10, it's Warface.
Warface is an mmo fps with pvp and pve. You've heard it, and a lot of free mmos do well to indulge the micro transactions, so to speak, but this one does something particularly egregious in that it's one of those games that just lets you use overpowered pay to win weapons for a limited time to try to get players to buy stuff.
Apparently, players that were around when this game began report that it wasn't always like this, which is kind of sad, but over the course of its life, it has added various events with temporary weapons. They also have this really complicated store system that more or less lets you continually buy better guns than are available, via any in-game currency, or by drop.
Apparently some of them are available through loot boxes, but it's so infrequent that it's actually extremely likely you will not see any of those weapons out of a loot box. I mean, when people say that the game was alright a few years ago before this stuff, but this destroyed the game, that sucks because rather than improving the game and attracting a bigger base of players, they took the base of players that liked the game and exploited it.
Curiosity
Basically, you were plopped into a white room, and there was a big cube made up of a ton of little cubes with white text, which were topic-related and had little messages. Basically, it tapped the cubelets to dig through the surface and reveal the next layer. I mean, the game is called "Curiosity," what's inside the cube, so you probably understand exactly what the point is to get to the center and figure out what is in the center of the cube.
The game was literally turned into a microtransaction game. You could click on the cube to remove the spaces from it, or you could buy the ability to destroy more spaces and possibly get to the center of the cube. According to Molyneux, it was some kind of experiment in monetization. He claims the studio wanted to implement them to see what happened, not necessarily to make money, but considering the simplicity or feigned complexity of the game, depending on what you want to pick, it seems like the microtransactions were the main part of the game.
He claimed that it was some kind of an experiment in patience, but come on man, that's ridiculous. He tried to make a bunch of money off of a dumb goofy pie in the sky idea again, except for this time, he didn't even pretend to be ambitious about it.
Heroes generals
And number eight is heroes and generals. This is basically a large-scale free-to-play, multiplayer FPS which has a couple of cool sounding features like having a persistent overworld where all these battles actually make changes, but let's just talk about how much it costs for four tanks for one faction to be more than sixty dollars.
If you're buying all these tanks, you're paying more than sixty dollars, and this is a game where ostensibly you would just continually get tanks. It's a war game. They make it a ridiculous grind too, and people who don't understand what's going on seem to just think this game is incredibly unbalanced.
I don't get it. Why does this other team keep spawning these incredible tanks? Well, it's because they bought them. I don't know why they bought them. They're again ridiculously priced. I've seen players say 60 dollars isn't worth every single tank in the entire game, let alone just four, but there are other problems as well, like people talking about how the lobby isn't necessarily as functional as it should be and there's pay to win stuff in it as well.
I mean, it's not like the game is without its defenders. There are people who are like, "Hey, the grind is like that to keep people from using really big weapons early in the game," and it's like, "Well, it's like that so that people buy the really big weapons and use them early in the game." At least that's my response, And number seven is Super Bomberman, a game that is, well, bomber man.
Bomberman r
They do have a 64-player. But since it's still Bomberman, it's a very simple game. It's not difficult. It doesn't require a lot of terrain. It's not going to blow your brain with originality or anything like that. It's just Bomberman. It's a simple game that is fun as hell, but it's not complicated.
So having things like season passes and currency that you can't earn, you have to buy for what seem to be some fairly limited power-ups. Again, this is a simple little arcade game. I'm a huge fan of Bomberman. I've played Bomberman since the 1980s. I am an old bird, but you will always be a huge fan of Bomberman.
I've played Bomberman since the season passed. Yeah, I mean, again, just have season passes and Bomberman. It's ridiculous, but then again, Konami itself is just ridiculous at this point.
Counterstrike nexon studio
At number six is Counter-Strike Nexon Studio, which is a free-to-play. It is basically a counter-strike port of Counter-Strike Online, which is a game that was developed jointly between Valve and Nexon for the Asian market, so as you might be able to tell from the fact that you can't just straightforwardly explain it, it is not a high quality game.
Counter-strike Online is a mobile game, and Counter-strike, Nexon Studio, is a port of that mobile game, except you can play it anywhere in the world. A lot of servers don't work, and although there are some modes that are exclusive to this game, like soccer or kind of a minecraft-ish mode where you build stuff, yeah, it doesn't make any sense for a counter-strike, it's not really worth the fact that it is pay to win and a lot of the time the micro transactions don't even work, particularly for players in various regions, like Ukrainian players, who apparently have lots of trouble, technically speaking, buying anything for this game, which I don't know why they're doing that.
The hunter
But yeah, at number five is the Hunter Classic, which we have to immediately say is actually a saving grace before we even get into why it's bad. There is a new version of this game that is a paid version of the game but doesn't contain microtransactions of any kind now, as you might expect. The Hunter is a game where you hunt various animals.
You are a hunter. That's the point. But in the old classic version, which is still available on steam, you had to buy licenses in order to hunt certain animals, which is ridiculous. In this game, you can't do anything about a certain animal because you didn't buy a license. Well, in real life, I mean you could do something illegal, but in the hunter class, you can just fork over a couple bucks to Avalanche Studios, and that adds up.
