Warframe

Warframe's reputation is built on a simple, radical fact: everything in it can be earned by playing. Not the trial-tier version of everything — every warframe, every weapon, and even the premium currency, which is player-tradeable and therefore farmable. Thirteen years of expansions have arrived free. Digital Extremes has been running one of the most generous business models in the industry for over a decade and it has worked.

The movement is the other pillar. Bullet jumping, wall latching, aim gliding and rolling chain into a traversal system that turns tilesets into playgrounds, and no other shooter moves like it. Combat is a power fantasy of absurd, escalating scale — by the late game you are deleting rooms — and it is unapologetic about that.

The onboarding problem

Warframe is the hardest game on this list to start. Thirteen years of systems — mods, polarities, focus schools, railjack, necramechs, kuva liches, incarnon adapters — have accumulated with limited pruning, and the game explains almost none of them adequately. New players are expected to use the community wiki as a manual. Digital Extremes has improved the early hours repeatedly and it is still not close to sufficient.

Get past it, ideally with a veteran to answer questions, and there is more game here than almost anything else available, at no cost. The 1999 update and subsequent story content proved the studio can still deliver ambitious narrative work. Just budget the first ten hours as tuition.