Forging Ahead: Forge going Free-to-Play next week

Forge has had a rough year. The self described class based, third person fantasy shooter originally debuted on Kickstarter back in 2012, but fell short of its 300,000 dollar goal. Yet, Dark Vale Games the studio behind Forge found the will and the way to continue development. The studio opened up pre-orders on the official Forge website and a few months later Forge emerged.

The best way to describe Forge would be to call it a mix of ability style combat found in most free aiming action MMOs, with the movement fluidity of something like GunZ. What you get is very fluid MMO PvP combat without the MMO. Players need only worry about their personal skills and not what items or upgrades their enemies posses.

When Forge was released it was met with some success which allowed Dark Vale to continue development on the game as they had initially intended. However, the studio has been forced once more into survival mode and has decided to shed the price tag and go Free-to-Play. In a news post on the official Forge website the developers spoke of why they choose to pursue F2P and shed some light on Forge's F2P model:

So, what will Forge F2P look like? Well, we continue to stand by our commitment that Forge will not be pay-to-win. As you see from our item store already, items are cosmetic. We hope in the future to add customization to cosmetic items as well. So the assassin could have a different dagger that gave her some kind of customization as well. For now, we will offer armor sets and XP boosts. We will be introducing 4 new sets including Bivröst Armor, Gullveig’s Armor, Armor of Muspelheim, and new war-painted helms: the Bardajalmor. For a while we had the idea of being a little more of a Freemium offering and charging for Progression. We have since decided from feedback from all of you to drop this idea and allow all access to the Item Store.

Looks like Forge's cash shop dodged the Freemium bullet and ended up in a nice spot. From the looks of things, everyone will get a chance to use the cash shop not just those with cold hard cash. But how expensive will these items actually be? Dark Vale explains:

We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from all of you as well as from some F2P experts on our pricing. One common theme is that we need to have items priced for all types of players. So, some that are priced for the first purchase player and some higher priced more exclusive items. We also want to take into account the time it takes to play Forge to unlock some of these items. For example, The Kaldrhiti Armor takes around 800 games to unlock. It’s hard to put a price on your time playing Forge, but we don’t want to de-value it. So, this will obviously be a higher priced more exclusive item.

So it may take some time to get the rarest armor, but keep in mind it also took a long time to acquire before the game went F2P. Dark Vale is hoping to get Forge switched over in an upcoming patch sometime next week. Does Forge interest you?