What a free-to-play collection role-playing game actually is

The shape of the genre

A collection role-playing game is built around assembling a group of characters and improving them over time. You begin with one or two, you acquire more, and the game's challenges are designed so that progress depends less on your reflexes than on which characters you have, how far you have developed them, and how sensibly you have grouped them for a particular fight.

That last point is what separates this genre from the role-playing games many people met first. In a traditional single-player role-playing game you are given a fixed cast and a story that carries you from one end of the map to the other. Here, the cast is the puzzle. A fight you cannot win today may be straightforward in three weeks, not because you have become quicker, but because you now hold a character whose particular ability happens to answer it.

Most games in this category are also designed to be played in short, repeated sessions rather than long ones. The daily structure — a set of small tasks, a limited number of attempts at the harder content, a reward for showing up — is a deliberate part of the design, not an accident. Understanding that early will save you a certain amount of confusion later, when you notice the game is nudging you to return at the same time each day.

The word "free-to-play" describes the price of entry and nothing else. The download and the account cost nothing. The game then offers things you may buy, and the rest of this step is about what those things typically are and why they exist.

The words you will meet

Every genre builds a private vocabulary, and this one builds a particularly dense one. You do not need to memorise these; you need to recognise them when a storefront page or a help article uses them without explanation.

Two of these deserve a second look. "Energy" is the mechanism that converts a game into a habit: when your allowance refills whether or not you are at the keyboard, there is a quiet incentive to come back before it overflows. And "banner" is the mechanism that converts a collection into a schedule: a character available this fortnight may not be available next month, which is the engine behind most of the urgency you will feel.

The trade behind a free download

A game that costs nothing to install still costs a great deal to make and to run. Servers, artists, writers, voice actors, translators and support staff are all paid. The money comes from a minority of players who spend, which means the design has to make spending attractive without making not-spending impossible. That balance is the single most important thing to understand about the genre.

In practice, the things offered for sale usually fall into four groups. The first is time: a purchase that gives you immediately what playing would have given you in a fortnight. The second is convenience: extra storage, extra attempts, the removal of a daily cap. The third is access: a randomised chance at characters you cannot otherwise obtain, or at obtaining them sooner. The fourth is appearance: cosmetic items that change how something looks and nothing else.

None of those four is unfair in itself. What matters is knowing which one you are being offered, because they carry very different value. Paying for appearance is a straightforward transaction — you see exactly what you get. Paying for access through a randomised draw is not, because the thing you are buying is a chance rather than an item, and chances are much harder to price in your head than objects are.

This is where a sense of proportion helps more than any rule. Before you install anything, it is worth asking what an hour of this would be worth to you, and what a month of it would be worth, and writing the answer down. The homepage checklist asks you to put a figure in Australian dollars on paper before you start. The reason is simply that a number decided in advance, when you are calm and not mid-session, is a much better guide than one decided in the moment.

Randomised rewards, and why they matter

Many games in this category sell, or allow currency to be spent on, a randomised outcome: you pay, and the game selects a character or item for you according to published or unpublished odds. This mechanic has attracted sustained attention from regulators and classification bodies in several countries, and Australia is one of them.

Rather than summarise a position that may have moved since this page was reviewed, we will point you at the source. The Australian Classification Board is the body that assigns classification ratings and consumer advice to games sold and distributed in Australia, and its site is where you can look up what has been applied to a particular title and what the advice lines mean. Step 3 of this course walks through how to do that lookup.

There is no need to be alarmed by any of this. Randomised rewards are a design choice, widely used and openly displayed. The point of naming them in Step 1 is only that they are the part of the genre most likely to cost you more than you planned, and the part most worth deciding about in advance rather than in the middle of a session.

What the first fortnight usually looks like

The opening hours of a collection role-playing game are generous by design. Early characters arrive quickly, early currency accumulates quickly, and the first set of challenges is tuned so that almost any group can clear it. This is deliberate and not deceptive — a game has to teach you its systems, and handing you resources is how it does that.

Somewhere between the first week and the third, the slope changes. Challenges begin to require characters developed past the point the free early resources will reach, and the daily structure becomes more visible. This is the moment at which most people form an opinion about whether the game is for them, and it is a reasonable moment to stop if the answer is no. Step 5 covers leaving cleanly.

Between those two points, the most useful thing you can do is pay attention to how you feel at the end of a session rather than during it. A session that finished because you were done is different from one that finished because the energy ran out. Both are fine. Noticing which one you had is what tells you whether your written limit is realistic.

The household in our worked example

Through this course we follow one invented household: two adults sharing a five-year-old Windows laptop on a kitchen bench. They are a hypothetical example, not real people, and nothing is claimed about what any product did for them.

At Step 1 their position is simple. One of them is curious after seeing an advertisement; the other has two concerns, which are whether the laptop can run anything made in the last few years and whether this becomes an open-ended expense. Those two concerns map exactly onto Step 2 and Step 3, which is the order this course takes them in.

What they do at the end of Step 1 is the small thing the checklist below asks of everyone: they agree a figure, write it on the whiteboard next to the fridge, and agree that it covers the whole household rather than each person. That is the entire exercise. It takes two minutes and it does more work than any amount of research.

One concrete example of the category

To keep the genre description from floating free of anything real, here is one title that sits in it. Raid: Shadow Legends is a battle collection role-playing game. The affiliate program that artgrafika s.r.o. participates in pays a commission when a reader registers on the landing page, installs the game and launches the tutorial, and the program covers desktop computers running macOS, Windows or Linux.

That is the limit of what we state about it, because that is the limit of what we have been told. We do not describe its characters, its pricing, its content or its quality, and we have not evaluated it. If you want to know those things, the publisher's own site is the place to read them, and Step 3 explains which parts of such a site are worth your attention.

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 rest of this step does not depend on you following it.

Before you move on

• A collection role-playing game is built around acquiring and developing characters, not around reflexes.
• "Free-to-play" describes the price of entry only. Money enters later, through time, convenience, access or appearance.
• Randomised paid rewards are the part most worth deciding about in advance, and the part the classification rating speaks to.
• The design assumes short daily sessions. That is a feature of the genre, and it is the thing your written limit has to survive.