Is Arknights Free-To-Play Friendly?

Arknights is a free-to-play gacha game that has a lot of charms and some unique gameplay. For those that enjoy the tower defense genre of games, it’s well worth checking out for the way it is presented, its polished mechanics, and content that requires a strategic touch.

Luckily you won’t need to shell out like Blaze here to enjoy Arknights.

Arknights is a gacha game, however, and that means that there might be some hesitations from players that may be wary of being pressured to spend money. This article will explore whether or not the game is actually free-to-play friendly and cover the main questions that you might have about the game.

Here is a question many people are asking as they see Arknight’s rise in popularity: is Arknights free-to-play friendly? Arknights is incredibly free-to-play friendly because everything in the game was designed to be fair and playable for all types of players and in all types of situations. Arknights never pressures players to spend money in order to progress in the game’s content and Arknights always gives users who don’t spend money a chance to get what they want.

Your favorite waifu will greet you when you start up the game.

Arknights has a special place in my phone because it has an aesthetic and design that quite hard to find anywhere else, therefore, even for some of its faults (content-wise – read more about it here), it’s a game that any gacha connoisseur should try out. For the full article and impressions for Arknights in 2024, click here!

Gacha Criteria to Be Free to Play Friendly

For a PVE focused game such as Arknights, the criteria to meet to retain free-to-players isn’t going to be as rigid as it is for PVP games such as Epic Seven for example.

The most important thing to consider, in my opinion, is that the game has a lot of PVE content that is enjoyable and rewarding to players who are not spending money to progress in the game.

For this type of game to be truly free-to-play, the game must meet these criteria:

Pulling duplicates characters should not introduce a massive power spike or make existing content trivial and there has to be a max duplicate level that each character can achieve. Pulling characters past this duplicate level does nothing – maybe it rewards some tokens for something else but it can’t be infinitely upgrading that specific unit or character.
All gacha characters of all rarities should be useful in some way in most of the content available.
Players should not feel pressured to pull on each banner to stay relevant to the meta.
A free-to-play player that invests an equal amount of time in the game as a paying player should still be able to compete with them 80-90% of the time.
Content isn’t gated by spending money on the game.
Free-to-play players should be able to get any banner character they want within a reasonable amount of time.

Character Duplicates & Power Creep in Arknights

Does Arknights have power creep? Thankfully, it does not have any significant power creep even as the game is approaching a year and a half in service. As said before, Arknights is designed to be completed with even the lowest rarity/easiest to get characters in the game.

Therefore, introducing power creep would likely raise the difficulty floor (not in a good way) so that the lower-star level characters would be deemed obsolete. Thankfully, that is not the case as Arknights has managed to keep the game at a manageable stage where the content is still challenging to the player without pressuring the player to spend.

Newer characters that are introduced into the game are usually completely new archetypes (meaning they are usually the character with a new theme or concept that hasn’t been introduced to the game previously). As a result, there isn’t any overlap of skills or mechanics that would force the player to replace their favorite waifu with the new one so you can rest easy to know that your efforts won’t be in vain.

How do character duplicates affect characters in Arknights? All characters in Arknights can be upgraded with their duplicates a maximum of 5 times after they are pulled. Called the “potential” system, a player would need to pull or collect 6 of the same character to max out the potential system. Afterward, tokens or currencies will be rewarded for any more duplicates obtained.

On the right side, I’ve unlocked 2 of the boosts for this character’s potential.

Obviously, pulling 6 copies of every character is not feasible for a free-to-play player, therefore, the game allows you to purchase the 6 stars through collecting distinction tokens (a currency that you get as you pull on any banner or recruitments). This will take a longer time to max out your character, but it still allows the player to get there without spending the money for pulls.

Luckily, the upgrades are not required for any character to be good and the boosts are just relatively minor passive upgrades to either stats or their existing skills.

Rate of Getting 6 Star Characters as a Free to Play

In Arknights, the maximum rarity that a player can obtain is a 6-star character. 6-star characters are more unique characters that have a certain mechanic or concept that they use. They’re not necessarily outright better than their lower-rarity counterparts (but they’re definitely cooler looking!).

The aesthetic of Arknights is very unique. From the world to the waifus.

For most gacha games, when a new character is released, it goes on its own banner. Arknights is no different. The characters will appear on their own rate-up banner with another 6-star or by themselves. Arknight’s rates for 6-star characters are better than most games at 2% (usually gacha games have a rate of 1% or below for the maximum rarity characters).

How Arknights does their pulling and pity system (guaranteed 6-star system) is quite interesting. Here are the details about Arknight’s rates and pity system below:

Within the first 10 rolls/pulls you’re guaranteed a 5 or 6 star (most free-to-players stop here unless it’s a character that they’ve been saving up for).
In the first 50 pulls, there is a set 2% chance of getting a 6 star.
If no 6-star character was pulled within 50 pulls, the rate increases by 2% each subsequent pull after that. So the 51st pull will have a 4% chance, 52nd a 6% chance, 53rd an 8% chance, etc. until you are able to pull a 6-star character.
After a 6-star unit is pulled, the rate resets back to the standard 2% until you’re unlucky enough to have not pulled a 6-star within 50 pulls again.
When you pull a 6-star it is not guaranteed to be one of the banner characters. You have a 50% of getting a banner character when you pull a 6-star unit.

Taking into account how long it takes to save up enough to get a certain character you like after the one-time rewards, Arknights has a slower pace than other gachas to get a 6-star character.

However, it does have some mechanics to offset this a bit for free-to-play players:

Depending on the randomized tags that you get – it’s possible to be guaranteed a 6-star character! Throughout playing Arknights, I have obtained a 6-star operator 4 times from recruitment.

Indra for example has the highest chance to be obtained when the player finds a Senior Operator tag with the Guard tag. There are other combinations that she will appear as well. For players playing the game, this calculator is a useful tool to see what characters might appear depending on the tags that appears.

The free-recruitment feature allows you to get 3 to 6-star characters if you’re lucky for free (think of it as the game’s daily pull – except you can pull as many times as you want as long as you have the ticket for it – which can be obtained through daily and weekly missions). The game occasionally adds more 6-star characters to the recruitment pool after some time.
Within the first 10 pull of every new banner is guaranteed to net you either a 5 or 6-star. Therefore, it’s recommended that free-to-play players always do these pulls.

How to Obtain Originite Prime and Orundum as F2P Player in Arknights

There are two main currencies in the game that players will want to collect. They are Originite Prime and Orundum in which you get from playing the game.

First is Orundum and it’s mainly used for headhunting (aka. pulling for characters). Originite Prime can be converted to Orundum but it’s the harder currency to get. Therefore, players will save their Originite Primes.

Annihilation is going to be the top way that free-to-play players are going to get their sweet sweet Orundum.

Originite Primes are used for restoring Sanity (stamina to keep playing the game), can be converted to Orundum to do pulls (1 Originite Prime converts to 180 Orundum), purchasing skins for your characters, purchasing furniture for your base, and purchasing boosts/enhancement packs.

When the one-time rewards dry up for the free-to-play however, what can you do to obtain these precious currencies to keep doing pulls or obtain cosmetics?

Orundum Notes:

Again, used for pulling. One pull costs 600 and 10 pulls costs 6000 Orundum.
With minimal effort, players can gather over 2900 Orundum a week (1700 from Annihilation & 1200 combined from daily and weekly missions)
The mileage store from pulling and recruiting also stocks up to 600 Orundum. This resets every month. It’s always recommended to clear out the mileage store every month if it’s possible.
So in a month, from putting in minimal effort – you end up with around 12,200 Orundum. Which is enough to do 12 pulls on a banner. Which is a respectable amount. However, the rate to get up to pity is lower when compared to Epic Seven in which in a month, a player is able to get enough currency to reach half of what they need to be guaranteed the banner unit, not just any 6-star.
There are other ways to get more Orundum from Arknight’s base-building mechanics but it is quite a time investment and requires a lot of farming. Therefore, this is mostly reserved for more late-game players.

If you’re going free-to-play, save as much Originite Primes for the skins. It can make you go from not caring about a certain character to “I think I have to build them now”.

Originite Prime Notes:

Again, no source of free-to-play income for Originite other than the one-time rewards that is awarded when a stage is cleared with 3 stars for the first time. Clearing the challenge modes will also reward 1 Originite.
For free-to-play players, Originite should be mainly used to purchase skins (Operator outfits) because it’s the only currency for players to buy skins with.
If the player does not care about cosmetics or skins, then they can feel free to use it for more pulls or stamina to keep farming resources.

Can I Compete With Other Players in All Content Being F2P?

As Arknights is a PVE game, getting up to the point where veteran players are at is actually quite easy. There is nothing to compete with other than maybe how many skins and cosmetics you might have.

Since teams can include a lot of characters in Arknights – it’s good to have a wide variety of characters to balance out your team.

Again, Arknights is a tower defense game in which with some strategy – it’s possible to complete all the stages without paying a dime to get the special 6-star characters.

However, it is nice that the game has some systems in place so that even though free-to-players don’t spend, they can still do pulls daily (through the free-recruitment) to try to get lucky.

How Does Paying Benefit Players in Arknights

There’s no gear or anything in the game to upgrade other than the characters themselves so most of the paying in the game is primarily for cosmetics and just more pulls. Some more hardcore players purchase Originite Primes to farm for more resources or do more stages.

Which Are the Best Packs To Buy in Arknights?

So if you’re enjoying the game and want to support it, what are the best packs to buy? I’m not going to go into all the math associated, here are the most popular, value-conscious packs to buy in Arknights (from least expensive to most expensive):

$.99 – Starter Pack: Includes 4-star unit, along with upgrade resources.
$4.99 – Monthly Pass/Card: 6 Originite now and 200 Orundum & 1 stamina potion daily for 30 days as long as you log in.
$25.99 – Starter Headhunting Pack: two 10 pull tickets to use on the gacha.
$9.99 – Starter Upgrade Pack: 13 Originite prime and a bunch of character resources.

It wasn’t me that bought these, I swear.

Past that, you’re on your own from here grasshopper. Remember, Arknights doesn’t require you to have the best characters nor is it a game you need to rush.

Verdict

Arknights is one of the most free-to-play-friendly gacha games out there. It’s one of those games that’s a joy to play at your own pace without the need to compete with other players.

The content in the game rewards strategy and team composition rather than the ability to throw money at the screen (however, I won’t be surprised if you throw money at the screen for some of the waifus in the game – oh, the husbandos are great too).