“The First Descendant” features Warframe’s worst microtransactions with few of its strengths

I’m still moving forward with The First Descendant, which has some pretty decent combat and building in my opinion, for what it lacks in story and mission diversity.

But the more I play, the more I get attacked by things I hate, especially those related to microtransactions. And those that are taken directly from the game it imitates in almost every way, Warframe.

The problem here is that The First Descendant has taken almost every bad microtransaction concept from Warframe and made them more expensive, and worse. Every day I find some new absurd thing that the game has monetized, and while there are ways to take advantage of them, they make it so absurdly frustrating most of the time that you’ll want to throw in the towel and pay up. Which is of course the point.

I’m not against microtransactions in free-to-play games. I mean, they need a fewor the game wouldn’t exist at all. But these are usually optional cosmetics, and that’s that and more. We have:

• Paid Descendants, by simply purchasing the character itself, for $3-6 on average, potentially avoiding dozens of hours of grinding.
• Common skins that are nothing more than recolors of existing skins.
• Premium skins that sell often sell hair and makeup separately, and universal skins must be repurchased for each character.
• Ultimate skins that can cost $100 and require an even crazier level of grinding and RNG to put together.
• Paint that doesn’t work on free skins and is single use.
• Descendant slots are limited, so you need to purchase more to continue expanding your collection without “discarding” any of them.
• A battle pass that does not contain any character skins.
• The game puts “build timers” on objects you to have It takes time to get there, which can take hours or even days, unless you pay to avoid the wait.
• Paid boosts for XP, gold acquisition, weapon mastery, shard generation.
• Materials paid for crafting costs.

Again, you will indeed find almost all of these microtransactions in Warframe, but many here are more expensive and/or give you less bang for your buck. Also something that put me off Warframe, but here it’s even more terribly transparent and I really don’t like a game that throws up annoying obstacles at every turn to make you open your wallet to avoid them.

At this point, I have no problem paying $10-20 for a cosmetic skin in a free-to-play game if I really enjoy it or use a specific character. But a game that lowers its spawn rates just to say you can grind twenty hours for something you could buy for $6 bothers me. As does grinding and being hit with a multi-day wait time unless you pay to remove it. It’s disgusting.

Again, it’s Warframe, but it’s clearly worse and it certainly hasn’t earned the goodwill to monetize to this extreme level, offering players so little in return. It could end up making me throw in the towel entirely, depending on how I continue to feel as the game goes on.

Follow me on Twitter, Youtube, And Instagram.

Get my science fiction novels Herokiller Series And The Earthlings Trilogy.