Step 1 of 5
Step 1 — What a battle collection RPG is, and what it asks of you
You have probably seen one of these games advertised. They are among the most heavily advertised things on the internet, which is part of why so many people arrive at them knowing the name and nothing else. This step gives you the vocabulary and the shape of the thing, so that the next four steps have something to stand on.
The words you will keep meeting
Three or four words do most of the work in this part of the hobby, and all of them are plain once someone says what they mean.
- Role-playing game (RPG)
- A game in which you control one or more characters who become more capable over time. The characters have numbers attached to them — health, attack, speed — and those numbers go up as you play.
- Collection RPG
- An RPG where the central activity is acquiring characters rather than controlling a single fixed hero. You build up a roster and pick a team from it for each fight. "Hero collector" and "battle collection RPG" mean the same thing.
- Free-to-play
- A game that costs nothing to download and start. Money, if it changes hands at all, changes hands later and by choice. The phrase describes the price of entry, not the total cost.
- Campaign
- A sequence of pre-built levels with a story running through them, played against the computer rather than against other people.
- PvE and PvP
- Player versus environment: you fight the game. Player versus player: you are matched against another person's team. Many games of this kind have both.
- Dungeon
- A repeatable fight or series of fights that exists to produce a particular reward rather than to tell a story.
- Tutorial
- The opening stretch of a game that teaches the controls by walking you through a few fights with instructions on screen.
You do not need to memorise these. They are here so that when a friend, a shop page or Step 4 of this course uses one, you can keep reading without stopping.
What you actually do, minute to minute
Underneath the artwork, a collection RPG is a loop with four parts, and almost every game in the category runs the same loop with different decoration.
First, you fight. You choose a team of characters from the ones you have, send them into a battle, and the battle resolves — sometimes with you choosing each action, sometimes automatically. Fights in this category are usually short, a minute or two at most.
Second, you collect the reward. Winning a fight produces something: experience points for the characters who fought, materials, currency, occasionally a new character.
Third, you spend the reward on making your characters stronger. This is where most of the actual decision-making lives. You decide which of your characters deserves the limited materials you have.
Fourth, the stronger team lets you attempt a harder fight, which produces better rewards, and the loop begins again. That is the whole engine. Whether you enjoy it comes down to whether you find the third part interesting, because you will do it a great deal.
A useful way to test your own interest. Imagine a spreadsheet where you allocate a scarce budget across a list of items, and the list grows every week. If that sounds tedious, this category is probably not for you, whatever the artwork looks like. If it sounds quite pleasant, you have found the reason people play these for years.
Three ways a game can be paid for
This is the single most useful distinction in the whole course, and it takes thirty seconds to learn. When you look at any game, work out which of these three it is before anything else.
| Model | What you pay | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| Buy once | A single price before you can play at all. | The refund position if it will not run on your computer. |
| Subscription | A recurring amount, monthly or yearly, for continued access. | How to cancel, and whether cancelling takes effect at once or at the end of the period. |
| Free to begin | Nothing at the start. Optional purchases inside the game afterwards. | What the optional purchases actually are, and whether any of them are randomised. |
Collection RPGs are overwhelmingly in the third group. That is not a criticism of them; it is a fact about how the category is built, and it changes what you need to pay attention to. With a buy-once game your decision is made at the shop and then finished. With a free-to-begin game there is no single decision point, which is exactly why Step 3 asks you to create one for yourself before you install anything.
Being free to begin also means something straightforwardly good: you can find out whether you like a game without paying for the privilege. Many people play games of this kind for a long time and spend nothing. That is a normal way to play, not a deprived one, and nothing in this course treats spending as the expected outcome.
Where this category sits
Collection RPGs grew out of mobile phone games and most of them still look like phone games, with large buttons and screens designed for a thumb. A number of them now also run on desktop and laptop computers, either as a program you install or through the vendor's own launcher. A launcher is a small program whose job is to download the game, keep it updated and start it; Step 4 comes back to this.
Running one on a desktop computer changes a few practical things. You get a larger screen and a mouse, which makes managing a roster of dozens of characters considerably less fiddly. You use your home internet connection rather than mobile data. You have a keyboard for typing a long password properly. Against that, a desktop installation takes several gigabytes of drive space where a phone version might take less, and you cannot carry it around.
Some games in this category are desktop-only in the way they are distributed through a particular offer or link, even where other versions exist elsewhere. If you follow a link from an advertisement and it tells you it is for desktop computers, take that literally: the link is for a computer running Windows, macOS or Linux, and following it on a phone will not do what you expect.
One named example
To make the next steps concrete, the course names one product. Raid: Shadow Legends is a battle collection RPG. According to the vendor's published description, you assemble a group of characters it calls Champions and lead them through dungeons, clan boss fights and a campaign described as spanning twelve locations with full voice acting, in tactical player-versus-environment play.
That paragraph is the whole of what this course asserts about the product, because it is the whole of what the vendor states in the material available to us. We have not tested it, we do not rate it, and we make no claim about how it compares with anything else. Where a later step needs a detail the vendor has not published — system requirements, file size, regional availability — the course says so and tells you where to look.
The affiliate network that operates our link states that the offer is for desktop computers: Mac, Windows and Linux. It also states that a commission is paid when a reader registers on the landing page, installs the game and launches the tutorial. That is the commercial arrangement behind the link below, stated plainly.
Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website
Paid affiliate link: the publisher of this site is paid a commission if you register, install and start the tutorial through it. Your cost is unchanged, and nothing in this course depends on your using it.
The household in our example
Our hypothetical Adelaide household — two adults, one 15-year-old, no prior experience with installed games — started here. The adults read the four-part loop above out loud and recognised it immediately: one of them described it as "the same shape as the card game you played at school, with the swaps done by a computer".
Their first useful decision came from the money table. They established that the game being asked for was free to begin, not buy-once, and that the question in front of them was therefore not "should we spend $70 today" but "what will the rules be about spending later". They wrote that question down and left it for Step 3.
They also noticed that nobody had yet asked which computer it would run on. That became Step 2.
What the game asks of you
Three things, and it is worth being honest about all three before you start rather than discovering them in week four.
Time, in small regular pieces. Games of this kind are usually built around daily activity: a set of tasks that reset each day and reward you for coming back. This is why they suit some people's lives very well and other people's not at all. If you are the sort of person who will feel obliged to log in on a Tuesday night when you would rather read, that is worth knowing in advance. Step 5 deals with it directly.
An account. You will register one, which means an email address and a password at minimum. That account is the only thing standing between you and losing everything you have built, so Step 4 spends real effort on making it recoverable.
A spending decision that is never formally put to you. In a free-to-begin game nobody ever asks "would you like to buy this game?". Instead there are many small, optional offers. Making one deliberate decision up front is far easier than making a hundred small ones under pressure, and that is the whole purpose of Step 3.
Against those three, what you get is a game that costs nothing to try, runs on hardware you may already own, and can be abandoned at any point with no financial consequence at all. That is a reasonable bargain to consider on its merits.
Before you move on
You should now be able to say, in your own words, what a collection RPG is, describe the four-part loop, and sort any game you are shown into buy-once, subscription or free-to-begin. You should also know that one product is named in this course and why, and that links to it are paid.
Step 2 leaves the concepts behind and gets practical: finding out exactly what is inside your computer, which you can do in a few minutes without installing anything or paying anyone.
Step 1 checklist
- Write a one-sentence definition of a collection RPG in your own words, without looking at the glossary above.
- Say the four parts of the loop out loud: fight, collect, improve, attempt something harder.
- Name the game you are considering, and sort it into one of the three payment models.
- If it is free to begin, note the question you now have to answer later: what the household rule about spending will be.
- Decide honestly whether a daily-tasks rhythm suits your week, or whether you would resent it.
- Note which computer you expect to use, ready for Step 2.
- If anyone under 18 will play, note their age now; Step 3 needs it.
- Confirm you understand that this site is paid a commission on the one product it names, and that nothing else in the course depends on that product.