Is The First Descendant pay-to-win? Explained

With The First Descendant being fully available and out of beta, many are quick to call it a pay-to-win game. Any time a free-to-play MMO game comes out, there always has to be that catch that can stain the reputation of a game. 

Is The First Descendant pay-to-win?

To put it briefly, The First Descendant is not a pay-to-win game. 

First off, it’s a purely PvE (Player versus Environment) game, meaning that no matter how much one spends money over another, there is no outright “competitive advantage”. 

Admittedly, the introduction to the game’s UI and shop can be a bit jarring. You see all these cool characters, skins, and the Battle Pass costing Caliber, the game’s premium form of currency. A lot of new players’ immediate reactions to seeing everything seemingly locked behind a paywall will most likely default to this being a cash-grab or pay-to-win, but it isn’t.

Most things you see on these menus, like the non-starter Descendants and even their Ultimate counterparts can be obtained in-game. This game takes a lot of inspiration from how monetization works in other games, particularly Warframe. 

Warframe is a game that has also pushed a lot of newcomers away from how the menus look with the monetization. At a quick glance, players see a bunch of weapons and frames that seem like they are only obtainable with that game’s form of currency and never look back. 

There’s a new phrase that people call games like these that seem like they nickel-and-dime you for progression’s sake. It’s called stay-to-win.

Essentially, The First Descendant is a stay-to-win game, meaning that the more time you put into it, the further you’ll progress. You can play the entirety of the game well into the endgame stuff without ever forking over any real-world cash. The same applies to games like Warframe.

The only things you’d actually pay for in The First Descendant are cosmetics and gameplay features to speed up the grind. If anything, the money you spend on the game is either to satisfy your customization needs or save time.

This idea of thinking isn’t for everyone, which is understandable. But it’s another thing to label a game being “pay-to-win” without really seeing that most gameplay aspects are obtainable via farming.