Many people associate the free-to-play business model with games you can download and play for free, but still require you to pay a substantial amount of money to play at a decent pace or stand a chance in multiplayer. In a blog post on the Nosgoth website, a community manager from Square Enix explained how the latest addition to the Legacy of Kain universe will avoid a similar fate.
Nosgoth will be free-to-play when it releases and is entering open-beta soon, so if you are worried about dealing with people that paid hundreds of dollars for the best weaponry, then this blog post comes just in time. According to to the community manager in question, George Kelion, the game will reward the player with gold for simply playing the game and they can use this to buy weapons, abilities, perks and new classes. There is also a premium currency available in the form of “runestones” and the only difference between runestones and gold is that the stones can only be bought from Square and can also be used to purchase skins for your characters, keys to unlock item-crates and boosters that increase experience or gold gain. The blog post also explains how all the weapons are balanced so that even a player with the rarest toys can competitively play against somebody with the starter weapons.
All in all, it seems like Square Enix and Psyonix have taken some hints from Valve’s Team Fortress 2 and changed it around a bit to fit with their leveling mechanic. If the final game indeed works like advertised in this post, then I will have no objections against the business model.
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