A five-step course for Australian readers trying a free-to-play desktop role-playing game for the first time

Each step takes about eight to twelve minutes to read, and the whole course runs to roughly an hour if you read it end to end. You can also take one step a week, because each one finishes with a checklist you can work through away from the screen.

Step 1 — What a free-to-play collection role-playing game actually is: the shape of the genre, and the trade you are making when the download costs nothing.
Step 2 — Working out whether your desktop computer will run it: how to read your own machine's specifications and compare them to what a publisher asks for.
Step 3 — Classification ratings, in-game purchases and account terms: the three documents worth reading before you sign up for anything.
Step 4 — Installing from a source you trust, and the first session: a general procedure for registering, downloading and checking that what you installed behaves.
Step 5 — Settling in: time, money and leaving cleanly: how to set limits that hold, and how to close an account and remove the files when you are done.

Who this course is for, and who it is not for

This workbook was written for a reader in Australia who has heard of free-to-play role-playing games, has a desktop or laptop computer rather than only a phone, and would like to understand what one asks of them before installing anything. You do not need to know what a gacha is, what a tier list does, or how any particular game works. Every term is explained the first time it appears.

It is not for you if you already play several of these games and want tactics, team compositions or progression advice. There is none of that here. It is also not the right reading if you are looking for a verdict on which game is best. This course teaches you how to ask your own questions, because the answers change whenever a publisher changes its terms, and a ranking written today would be stale within a season.

What you will be able to do after each step

After Step 1 you will be able to explain, in your own words, how a game that costs nothing to install earns money, and what that means for how it is designed. After Step 2 you will be able to find your computer's processor, memory and graphics details without help, and compare them to a published requirements list.

After Step 3 you will be able to look up an Australian classification rating, find the consumer information a publisher must display about in-game purchases, and read the parts of an account agreement that matter most. After Step 4 you will have a repeatable installation routine that works for any desktop game, not just one. After Step 5 you will have a written limit on time and money that you set yourself, and a plan for closing the account if you decide the game is not for you.

The one checklist to do before anything else

If you only do one thing from this whole course, do this before you create an account anywhere.

Write down the exact model of your computer and its operating system version. You will need both in Step 2.
Decide now, in writing, the maximum amount in Australian dollars you are willing to spend on a game you have not played yet. Zero is a perfectly ordinary answer.
Check that the email address you plan to register with is one you still control and can receive mail at today.
Agree with anyone else in the household who shares the computer about what may and may not be installed on it.

A worked example you can follow through the steps

Through the course we follow one hypothetical household, invented purely to make the steps concrete. Two adults share a five-year-old Windows laptop that lives on the kitchen bench. One of them has seen advertisements for a fantasy role-playing game and is curious; the other is mainly worried about what it will do to the laptop and to the household budget.

This household is an illustration, not a case study. Nobody in it is real, no outcome is reported, and nothing it does is presented as a result you should expect. It exists so that each abstract instruction — "check the stated requirements", "read the purchase information" — has something ordinary attached to it.

What you can do without spending anything

Most of this course costs nothing to follow. Reading a classification rating is free. Checking your own hardware is free. Reading a publisher's terms is free. Installing a game whose download is advertised as free is, by definition, free at the point of installation — though Step 1 is largely about understanding why that is not the end of the story.

Nothing in this workbook requires you to buy a product, and no step is blocked if you skip the one page that mentions a specific game. If you reach the end having installed nothing at all, the course has still done its work: you will know how to evaluate the next one you are offered.

Where Raid: Shadow Legends appears in this course, and why

Raid: Shadow Legends is used in two places as a concrete example of the category, because artgrafika s.r.o. has a commercial arrangement with the affiliate network that operates the link to it. Being honest about that is more useful than pretending the example was chosen at random.

What we can tell you about it comes from the affiliate program description and nothing else: it is a battle collection role-playing game; the program pays a commission when a reader registers on the landing page, installs the game and launches the tutorial; and the program is for desktop computers running macOS, Windows or Linux. Anything beyond that — pricing, content, how it plays — you should read on the publisher's own site, and Step 3 shows you how to read it.

Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website

Paid link. If you register and install after following it, artgrafika s.r.o. may receive a commission. The link does not change what this course says.

Australian organisations worth knowing

Several steps point to Australian bodies that publish free material on the topics they cover. The Australian Classification Board publishes the classification ratings and consumer advice applied to games in Australia. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance on online safety, including for families. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is the national consumer regulator, and Scamwatch is the service it runs for reporting and reading about scams.

For the technical side, the Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes plain-language advice on keeping devices and accounts secure, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is the national privacy regulator. We describe what each one is; we do not speak for any of them.

How this course is written and kept current

The five steps were written in sequence by the editorial team at artgrafika s.r.o. and are reviewed as a set, so that a change in one step is carried through the others. Where a step relies on something that can be checked — a regulator's published guidance, a classification decision — the step links to the source rather than summarising it from memory.

Where a step relies on something that cannot be checked from outside, such as the details of a particular publisher's terms, the step tells you to go and read the current version rather than trusting a description written months earlier. The review date appears at the foot of every page. The About page sets out the method in full, including the commercial relationship behind the example used in Step 1 and Step 3.

You can start whenever you like and stop whenever you like. Nothing here records your place, and nothing asks for your details. When you are ready, Step 1 begins here, or you can skip ahead to all five checklists on one page.