There is a store, and all the other crap you'd expect in a F2P, but it's aggressive monetization in the sense of just being dumb rather than anything functional. It's like watching a child draw a picture of a house. It vaguely conforms to the correct shape and the subject is identifiable yet all the proportions are wrong, nothing is quite functional and they've drooled all over the page in one of the corners.
You can see the effect of this in the
You must be registered to see the links
. There are quite a few players with access to the closed beta, as evidenced by the 1.5k peak from a few years ago, and yet average online users rapidly dropped to tens of players within a few weeks after the latest patch. It's averaging ~50 online at the moment and still trending downward.
You can't build a F2P with that kind of player churn. There's no core gameplay loop to keep people playing, the grind is tedious and even the lootboxes lack the kind of subtlety most F2Ps have with simulating near misses, artificial reward ratios etc. Even if I were on board with building a hyper-aggressively monetized F2P game... this is not the way to do it.
The most likely outcome of all this is that if Helius ever actually does launch this game it'll be dead within a year and the servers will get shut off. Especially since they somehow managed to mess up the design of the backend to the point where it can barely handle 300 concurrent players.
