When you hear "Free to Play" the first things that immediately pop into your head is a game that is very repetitive, very grind and heavy with microtransactions. Every time you turn around the game is asking for money for access to certain quests, certain weapons and outfits.
Fortnite is probably the game that most of you probably think of when you hear "Free to Play". A game that asks players for money at every point for the Battle-Pass, the emotes, the outfits, the weapon skins etc. etc.
However, there are free to play titles like Warframe. Warframe is probably the gold standard of free to play titles. It is a game that while yes offers microtransactions for many of it's in game items and special goods. A lot of what the game offers is completely free. You can make it from expansions to expansion without paying a penny for better gear, better warframes to take on combatants. You can grind for as long as you'd like to getting better gear and you will rightfully be rewarded for your efforts.
Then there's Destiny 2.
When Destiny 2 went Free to Play, understandably, many players rejoiced and were excited as to the possibilities of playing together with friends. Especially a game of Destiny's caliber with awesome weapons, stylish armor and awesome powers.
Who wouldn't love to shoot off a giant ball of space magic that obliterates large groups of enemies in a blink of an eye?
However, I don't think Destiny 2 is really free to play. Here's what I mean.
Free to play games tend to offer you a great deal of things to do without paying a penny. They give you a good starting point and end point for your experience. At least some sort of quest to be on, a journey to venture forward into. This is what Destiny 2 severly lacks from a free to play perspective. Sure you can download all one hundred gigabytes of the game and play the first campaign mission of whatever the current expansion is but once that's done and the dust settles from your small glimpse into the current campaign, there is hardly anything left in terms of what to experience. Sure, you could play strikes and those could be fun, but why are you playing these strikes?
Why are you here in the EDZ to take on these "Taken" enemies? Why are you saving this Techeun priestess from being "Taken"? Why are you hunting this Vex Mind? Who is Clovis Bray?
These are small stories from the few strikes in Destiny 2 that you could experience in the Strike playlist and the problem here is that the story that informed all these strike missions are either content vaulted or not available unless you buy the expansions associated with these strikes.
What is even stranger is that there are strikes available in the regular Vanguard Strike Playlist but if you want a little bit of a challenge and a chance to earn more gear, the Nightfall playlist will be unavailable to you unless you buy the expansion associated with the strike that you can play in the normal playlist for free.
So a good portion of the Destiny 2 story is locked away unless you put down the money for expansions that are years old at this point. Strikes are a fun way to experience the Destiny 2 combat and the fun of blowing up space aliens and getting shiny new gear to blow up even more space aliens but when you want to experience other things that the game has to offer you have to whip out your wallet.
To put that into perspective, here are the numbers. If you buy the Legacy Collection, which is the Beyond Light expansion, Shadowkeep expansion, Witch Queen expansion and the Forsaken Content Pack which is just the exotic weapons and strikes associated with Forsaken is sixty dollars. That is the price to pay if you want to get access to an entire back catalog of Destiny 2 story content, access to raids, dungeons and exotic weapon quests.
Problem though, not all of this content is going to be worth that price point. Shadowkeep was a middling expansion with Beyond Light being a middling expansion as well. Witch Queen is the only expansion where Bungie clearly brought their A game and even then I would not say it is worth that sort of asking price, considering how much we get vs how much we pay for these content expansions.
This Legacy Collection also does not include the complete and total access to everything Destiny 2 has to offer. There is a content pack called the 30th Anniversary Pack which includes access to a legendary exotic weapon from back in the original D1 days plus cosmetics and that comes at the price of twenty five dollars. UPDATE: Now there is another bundle called the "Armory Pack" which is the 30th Anniversary Pack and the Forsaken Pack which includes the raid and dungeons associated with the Forsaken pack. This bundle costs 30 dollars USD.
So let's add this all up if you want to play Destiny 2 and have everything that is in the game from campaign expansions plus season passes plus dungeon keys, these are the prices of Destiny 2 content as it stands on the Steam store page:
Destiny 2 Legacy Collection: 59.99
Destiny 2 Armory Collection (30th Anniversary & Forsaken Pack): 29.99
Destiny 2 Lightfall: 49.99
Total: $139.97
Then let's include the Dungeon keys for whatever season we may find ourselves in which is 2,000 silver (Destiny's premium currency) which for that much silver costs 19.99.
So now if you wanted the ENTIRE Destiny 2 experience plus the seasonal content you are looking at a grand total of : $ 159.96
Now look, I understand that Bungie needs to make their money somehow, in order to pay their developers who build the game and pay the bills for the space they work in and all sorts of other things but this is ridiculous for a supposed "Free to Play" game.
Destiny 2 is a solid shooter game to play with friends and the community, although they love to complain about everything the game does wrong, the community still is loyal to this game and play it regularly for days and weeks at a time. However, the biggest issue I think this community has with Bungie and Destiny 2's current state and how they monetize the game, they cannot recommend it to any other friends to jump in and play unless they've already put some time and money in the game since the first Destiny.
Micro-transactions are a big issue within online gaming today and there is no better example of that then with Destiny 2's monetization design. Not only are they asking for a whole heck of a lot for content at this point was middling to sub-par, save Witch Queen, now it seems Bungie is asking for EVEN MORE money when it comes to the new pricing of season passes.
Despite the fact that right now the active number of players in Destiny 2 might suggest that the game is thriving, it would probably be very interesting to see just how much of Destiny 2 that they have bought. Are these only the players that have paid to have access to some of the content or are these free to play players who simply are enjoying the ritual grind of earning rep with the different vendors in the game?
It would not surprise me if we took an even closer look at the make-up of current players to see that a good portion of the player-base is players simply enjoying the grind and ritual of logging in day to day, week to week to kill time but have either never tried or given up on doing end-game content like raids and dungeons because of the money they have to pay.
Destiny 2 is by no means an actual free to play game but is instead a free to try title with an insidious amount of micro-transactions to force players to put more and more money down to enjoy the game.
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