Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade Deconstructed Part 3 — Game Economy
In the first post of Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade Deconstructed I provided a high-level overview of the gameplay in Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade. In the second post I dove into the game loops that keep players engaged and coming back.
Part 1 — Game Basics
Part 2 — The Game Loop
Part 3 — Game Economy
Part 4 — Monetization
Part 5 — What’s Hot vs. What’s Not
In this post, I’m going to cover the topics related to the in-game economy of Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade including:
- In-game currencies
- Currency sources
- Currency sinks
- Ads
In-game currencies: Similar to many of the free-to-play games out there today, Freeblade utilizes two in-game currencies; a premium currency (gold) and a standard currency (Ore).
Gold: Gold is the ‘premium’ currency within Freeblade. It is harder to earn, but can be spent on more things in-game than Ore.
Ore: Ore is the more common resource and is primarily used for crafting new gear through the forge.
An integral part of any in-game economy is that you have a way to both earn and spend currencies. A careful balance between earning and spending needs to be established so players don’t have too much or too little of any currency. All the ways that currencies can be acquired are called Currency Sources, and all the ways that currencies can be spent are called Currency Sinks.
While Freeblade has multiple currency sources and sinks, my experience has been that they’ve created a fairly healthy balance between the two that makes the currencies feel valuable from a player perspective. While having many currency sources and sinks provides the developer with more levers to tweak the in-game economy, it could also make it more challenging to manage.
Currency Sources: Freeblade provides you with many ways to acquire ore and gold. While cash is one way to acquire these currencies, there are many opportunities to earn both Ore and Gold through in-game activities. Below is an overview of the different ways to acquire Ore and Gold in the game, or ‘sources’ of currencies.
Cash: As expected, real-world money can be spent in the store for Gold or Ore. $1 USD is roughly equivalent to about 100 gold and 16,000 ore, on average.
Quests: Quests are a great source of currencies and resources. While Gold is less-common, you can earn a decent amount of Ore through quests. Note that quests also provide gear and boosts as rewards.
(Gold Only) Leveling-up: You’ll earn about 5 to 10 gold per level as a reward for leveling-up your Freeblade. This is probably the most challenging and limited way to earn gold.
Event Missions: You can earn both Ore and Gold through daily and weekly events depending on how well you’ve performed. For example, in the daily event the reward ranges from 2,000 Ore to 80 Gold depending on your performance. I’ve personally found this to be one of the better sources of gold.
(Ore only)Story and Patrol missions: Your primary source for earning Ore is completing Story and Patrol missions, and this is a key part of the core game loop as mentioned in the previous post.
(Ore only) Ad: Every 12 hours there’s an opportunity to earn free Ore by watching a 30-second ad on the home screen. The amount of Ore rewarded appears to be dependent on the level of your Freeblade.
Salvage Team (Every 12 hr): Salvage Teams provide a random item from a list of items that are refreshed every 12 hours. While the rewards definitely seem to be weighted it is still a great source of free ore, gear, and boosts.
Gear: Gear can be ‘scrapped’ into Ore. While this isn’t a huge source of Ore, it’s worth mentioning given all the ways you can earn gear. I personally only recommend scrapping gear when you’ve acquired more than you can carry since gear is another critical component to crafting.
Daily Logins: Finally, a Daily Login system was recently implemented that rewards players with ore, gold, gear, and boosts for logging in daily. As an engaged player I find this system beneficial to me, but it’s unclear to me what type of player this is aimed at and what type of problem it potentially solves.
Currency Sinks: Currency Sinks are all the ways players can spend Gold and Ore once they’ve been acquired. As you review the Currency Sinks, take note of is the significantly higher number of Gold sinks in comparison to the number of Ore sinks. While Ore is more plentiful, the sinks for it are limited. In contrast, Gold is more limited, but there are many sinks for it.
Ore Sinks are limited to crafting gear and purchasing a limited number of customizations.
Forge (Crafting): The primary use of Ore in the game is crafting new gear. In order to progress through the game you need higher-level gear; if you don’t have gear that meets a minimum level you won’t be able to progress. Crafting gear in the forge requires both gear in and Ore.
Customizations (Paintings, Emblems, and Patterns): Players can customize their Freeblade with custom colors, emblems, and patterns. There are 3 different painting slots; a primary Paint, a primary Trim, and a Secondary Pain. I personally haven’t spent much Ore on customizations, but perhaps I will once I max out my gear. The customizations that can be purchased with ore are indicated with a small blue piece of Ore. While I won’t discuss the customization options in detail right now, this seems like the feature that is the least developed and has the greatest opportunity to improve from a player perspective.
Gold Sinks are more readily available than Ore Sinks. Unless you’re planning on buying a lot of Gold, you’ll find that you run out of it quickly if you don’t use it sparingly.
Boosts (Blessings): At the beginning of a Story or Patrol mission you can spend gold to buy boosts that apply to that mission. I would personally not recommend buying boosts for gold currently because they are considerably expensive relative to other things you can acquire, and there are less ‘expensive’ ways to acquire boosts.
Repairs: Each game you play damages your Mech a little bit. Eventually the decline in the structural integrity of your mech will decrease both your total health and the damage you do against enemies. Paying Gold will repair your Mech to 100% health.
Liveries: Liveries are effectively customization ‘sets’ that imbue the player with special bonuses. They range from 320 Gold to 2,500 Gold and can also be purchased for Cash as part of Value Packs.
Customizations (Paintings, Emblems, and Patterns): In addition to the Customizations that can be purchased with Ore there are many more cosmetic customizations that can be purchased only with Gold. One point of criticism is that the Gold cost of paintings and patterns seems extremely high compared to the Ore cost. While emblems purchased with Gold have in-game bonuses, I don’t perceive a benefit or differentiation in quality between the paintings and emblems that can only be purchased with gold compared to those that can be purchased with ore.
Forge Slots: The Forge is used to craft higher-level gear out of existing gear. You can purchase additional Forge Slots that allow you to craft multiple items at the same time. Even though I saved up to purchase an additional slot, I’ve found that I’m actually more constrained by Ore than anything else and rarely find myself using the extra forge slot.
Crafting speed (Forge):While gear in your inventory is always required for crafting, you have the option to craft a new item immediately using Gold. I personall have not used gold to speed up the crafting process and would would be much more inclined to purchase a livery or emblem which provide in-game benefits.
Additional Event Tries: If you didn’t do so well during one of the Event Missions, you can try again using Gold. Note that each additional try doubles the Gold cost.
Additional Salvage Team deploys: You can spend Gold on additional Salvage Team deploys. Similar to Event Tries, each additional deploy doubles the gold cost. I’ve personally found that this is a good way to acquire higher-level gear, but it does burn through my gold quickly.
Unlock Story Mode Chapters: You can spend Gold to unlock later chapters, but unless you have also bought Gear Packs, you are probably just wasting Gold.
Supply Drops: Supply drops are effectively bundled items with a guaranteed quality of gear depending on the amount of gold you spend. While these will help boost your Wargear rating, I personally haven’t seen the value in buying them, especially since all my gear is at least level 270 now.
Additional Patrols: As mentioned during the previous post, patrols refresh every two hours, however you can pay gold to refresh one of them sooner.
Ads: I decided to cover Ads in this post about the economy because it is so closely connected to the Currency Sources and Sinks in how it is implemented. Freeblade has one of the better implementation of ads I’ve seen in free-to-play games. Specifically, they’ve included ads as an optional alternative to gold across multiple locations. In contrast, some games force you to watch an ad after your die, which feels forced.
While the use of ads is limited, I feel like the value received is greater than the cost of having to watch a video. In addition, you feel like the reward complements the game experience rather than is required to enjoy the game as it was intended.
Here’s what watching ads gets you in Freebalde:
Boosts (Blessings): At the beginning of a Story or Patrol mission you can watch an ad for a single random boost. You can watch 2 ads per mission, and Damage Boosts are only rewarded if you have at least one of the 3 other boosts.
Ore: As mentioned in the Currency Sources section, every 12 hours you can watch an ad for ore that scales with your level.
Repairs: Watching an ad recovers about 10% of mech damage. This is useable up to 5 times within a 24 hour period and then has a cooldown.
Additional Event Tries: If you didn’t do so well during one of the limited events you can earn one additional try by watching an ad.
Additional Salvage Team deploy: Watching an ad nets you a free item from the salvage team. You can only watch an ad after the Salvage Team inventory resets, but this is a great way to get free resources and should be done before you start spending gold on additional deploys.
One takeaway I’ve had from analyzing Freeblade’s in-game economy is that the options provided to players to both earn and spend currencies is really empowering. As a player you are given the option to pay, play, or watch ads to earn currencies. From there you have the option to spend your resources on customizations, boosts, gear, and more. While this is probably more difficult to keep balanced by the developers, it feels pretty good to have these options as a player.
One area I think needs to be looked at more closely is what happens to the in-game currencies once you reach the end game. Almost all my gear is over lvl 300, and with the exception of Customizations, most Currency Sinks are focused on leveling-up your gear. There doesn’t appear to be a clear transition from increasing power to customizations once you reach the end-game, and the current customization options aren’t very appealing to me. In addition, until the multiplayer feature or other social features are launched, I don’t really have much motivation to customize my Freeblade.
In the next post I’m going to cover how monetization is implemented in Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade.
I’ve included a table of the current currency sources and sinks in the game.
