Warframe: Free to Play Perfected
Well, hello there, dear steemians! Have you heard of Warframe? Of course you have. You could not have missed this megalodon of a game even if you tried.
I have been playing this game on and off since the open beta in 2013, and man, has it changed a lot! Back then, there was no story to speak of, only our Solar System being used as a mission select screen, some menus to customize your equipment and the neverending grind to get resources and the odd boss battle. I still remember, some guy with the in-game name of Groovylicious was showing me the ropes, aka how the, janky at the time, parkour worked, what the mission objectives actually meant and how warframe abilities worked. For some reason, I stopped playing, then started again in 2016 to find an etirely new game. My character and equipment were still present, my mod upgrade materials were now turned into Endo, the material needed to upgrade mods in the new system they implemented and a credits bonus, seemingly for sticking with the game for so long. I still fell out with the game and started playing again this week, to find even more changes to the game.
But, enough with the history lesson. Why is this game so close to perfection in its free to play model? The answer is pretty simple actually: you can technically get everything in the game, even cosmetic items, by simply playing it. This entails a grind, yes, but look at it like this: microtransactions can buy you frames (aka classes) and weaponry, but you still need to upgrade them by actually using them in combat, the mods for them are not purchasable by microtransaction means, and you are actually amking progress, whatever you are doing in the game at any point. Even the premium warframes and weapons, the Prime equipment, can be acquired by opening relics in missions called Void Fissures. Relics are a dime a dozen, so the probability of you running out of them is really slim, and if you do, you can get them on normal missions.
All this would be for naught, if the moment to moment gameplay wouldn't be fun. You play as a space ninja with guns and space magic, infiltrating the bases of different factions, each with their own agenda. You can parkour around the randomly generated levels, enter bullet time by aiming your weapons while airborne, slice and dice enemies with your melee weapons or hit them with your space magic for devastating damage.
The big problem with the game: It is really, really dense. The game does not come to you, you go to it, meaning that the Warframe wikia is your best friend at all times. You will probably get frustrated at the amount of content which is either poorly explained or even not at all, but under that hostile first impression, Digital Extremes forged a damn good game. (a quick jab, I was expecting Destiny to be a AAA version of Warframe when Bungie announced it)
Speaking of Digital Extremes: this game is their baby, a game they wanted to make since before 2008. You might remember a mediocre game from that time, titled Dark Sector. A third person, not really, shooter in which the player controls a guy named Hayden Tenno and his weapon is the Glaive, a thrown weapon which returns like a boomerang. The initial concept for that game was indeed what has become Warframe (fun fact, Tenno is the race of the player character in Warframe, Hayden equips a suit similar to Excalibur in the MMO, and the Glaive is present in both games). They pitched the project of their MMO to many publishers, but everyone turned it down, saying it would not work, it would not be viable and so on. A rational development team would have canned the project, but DE stuck to their guns and showed everyone that they are the little studio that could. If that is not inspirational, I don't know what is.