It’s even worse. In order to get by in game, you need to pay a bunch of subscriptions.

No doubt! Whoever designed this game must have been a sadist. They start you off with a lengthy tutorial that gives you the basics of survival, then set you loose in the world overstacked in physical stats with none of the knowledge or skill stats to utilize the body properly. The skills and knowledge are behind a paywall (see earlier point about economy leveling in the early years) so they are only accessible to a subset of the player base. There are “opportunities” for players who can’t get past the paywall, but that doesn’t guarantee anything more that numerous levels of a lower loot percentage. If you don’t want to pay-to-win, you can grind away experience level after level, but converting experience to better loot is a lengthy process and is never converted at the same rate as someone with a paywall badge on their account. There’s also the mid-level-cap nerf that plateaus your body stats for a while before starting to slowly decrease them level by level. By the time you do have enough experience to complete the knowledge tree, your body stats are too low to take advantage of it. It’s like this whole damn thing was designed by EA!

Beautiful graphics and environments, though! And I really do like the open-world format, though it seems like recent updates have been amping up the NPC aggression attribute. I have a feeling this is primarily due to one of the major clans (klans?) gaining too much territory while the other clans were comfortable and complacent. That’s just a theory though. I don’t think we’ll really know until the final credits roll, but there are enough clues in the story to hint at the ending.

Also, it’s not Ferris Bueller or a Marvel movie. There’s no post-credits scene or new game+. I suppose you might be able to start a new game once yours is done, but you’re starting with a completely fresh account and nothing transfers. The only hope is that you roll a good starting character with a good faction.