From The First Descendant to Zenless Zone Zero, this summer we're drowning in F2P slop

The live-service bubble has been bursting for a while. That much is clear. But with how long most triple-A (and even double-AA) video games take to make nowadays and how absurdly huge the possible wins are, it comes as no surprise it's taking a bit of time to partially retreat from a model that's grown increasingly risky in the last three years or so. This summer, a handful of free-to-play titles such as The First Descendant and Zenless Zone Zero are making a splash, but we're still looking at the same big issue.

It's been looking for a while like most players give live-service models and shiny MTX shenanigans a proper beating when they're attached to premium releases, yet free-to-play games are either happily consumed or simply ignored because we've grown accustomed to them. At the end of the day, however, you're more likely to spend money repeatedly on a product that's given you so many hours of well-produced entertainment at no cost.

This has been proven time and again, and it's one of the reasons why Overwatch was sacrificed in favor of a more esports-friendly and streamlined 'sequel' that's ultimately alienated most of the player base the IP originally conjured up. That switcheroo didn't really pay off for Blizzard and Activision, as the title's recent developments have confirmed, but games that are F2P from the get-go get away with the same progression/unlock models all the time.

Before even reaching the summer season, which has been assaulted by free-to-play releases on all fronts, things were heating up with a new gacha operation masquerading as proper action RPG in the form of Wuthering Waves, which managed to sneak in just before HoYoverse's Zenless Zone Zero arrived, and Ubisoft's long-delayed and tested-to-hell-and-back XDefiant, which is actually a surprisingly solid alternative to modern Call of Duty. Hell, even Lucasfilm Games is p**sing me off ahead of Star Wars Outlaws with Star Wars: Hunters, which is somehow even more bland than I expected from Zynga.

On a surface level, those releases, much like most of the ones I'm about to rag on, are high-quality games that work well enough and deliver what you'd expect within their respective genres. They are, however, designed to try to maximize profits and player engagement, be it through traditional MTX, battle passes, or 'gacha pulls' – a.k.a. loot boxes under a different name.

A fair amount of players manage to ignore all those bits just fine, as the games themselves offer plenty of fun, and even cosmetics and in-game rewards, in exchange for only your hard-earned time. That said, spend over a dozen hours with them and you'll start to wonder why you aren't simply playing an 'upfront payment' release that won't be dangling carrots in front of you every five minutes or so.

The quick answer here is that modern free-to-play games are partially designed to make brains go brrr. The feeling is good overall, and the constant feedback loop is compelling if you don't know any better, or simply haven't built up the patience for meatier games (a worrying trend among children and teenagers), whether they're single-player or online. This is harder to criticize when the core is genuinely good and not compromised at all by the predatory shadow cast over them, as is the case with the aforementioned XDefiant or Apex Legends, EA's current golden goose that's already taken things a step too far.

Fast-forward to mid-July and we're currently riding The First Descendant and Zenless Zone Zero's hype wave. While the early numbers are strong (and the latter has been confirmed to be printing money), it remains to be seen whether they're yet another 'flavor of the month' or are here to stay. Beyond its dreadful gacha skeleton and overall design, I don't mind ZZZ. I played it for a few hours. It's well put-together. The animators and artists, as well as combat designers, did a great job with it.

Everything else? The very definition of expensive slop. Walls of text blocked the flow of the whole thing every two to three minutes and made me sit through paragraph after paragraph of anime nonsense. Signals somehow seem even worse gacha pulls than their Genshin Impact equivalents (I never touched Honkai: Star Rail). In conclusion, I soon was malding about how such a well-presented game was stuck inside such a restrictive model and with such undercooked writing.

As for The First Descendant, it might easily be one of the worst things I played this year, not because it feels poorly made, but because – I'm not exaggerating here – there isn't a single ounce of originality in its body. I truly kid you not, you're better off playing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League if you need a new expensive looter-shooter. Hell, it's even going free for a bit with Prime Gaming.

Even if you click with The First Descendant's soulless loop of numbers going up (but amounting to nothing in the moment-to-moment gameplay) and generic-looking weapons showering your big-butt robo-rabbit waifu, you should soon be wondering why you aren't on Warframe instead, which isn't my jam, but clearly has a creative vision, at the very least.

I've never been someone who hates the free-to-play model, or purely cosmetic MTX, or reasonable battle passes. Hell, I'm not a Fortnite regular, but I strongly believe Epic Games has been killing it over there with well-paced progression and skins that are actually worth your money and integrate well within the artistic whole of the experience. I put dozens of hours into Apex back when it first released instead of studying for my February exams.

I still play Call of Duty regularly, and have even bought a couple of overpriced skin packs because they landed the exact IP collaboration that tickled my brain. I'm not free of sin. But there are limits, and this year it feels like everyone's trying to squeeze as much as they can from a gold rush that might be soon ending or at the very least being dialed back to keep development costs down.

What I'm getting at is that we might be reaching a 'peak slop state' that leads to most gamers that play more than two games per year waking up and realizing many flashy free-to-play triple-A releases are just three MTX plus a sussy-looking EULA inside a trench coat, and the only thing missing is them pulling a literal gun on you as soon as you install them.

Will Once Human be the one procedurally-generated-looking, 2024 F2P release that casts a spell on me somehow? I sincerely hope it's not the case, as I've got a huge backlog of proper games waiting for me to be done messing about.