5 live-service games you’ll get lost in

The idea of a game that never ended was just a dream only a decade or so ago. Sure, we had plenty of games with online multiplayer modes that you could theoretically keep playing as long as the servers were up, but you were never meant to stick around for years after. Even DLC content wasn’t big or frequent enough to keep people around for long. Once consoles caught up to PCs a bit more around the PS4/Xbox One era, suddenly a new type of game emerged: the live-service.

Instead of buying a game, beating it, and waiting for the sequel, live-service games add bits of content over time instead of making a complete sequel. This usually includes some combination of smaller updates, like daily/weekly events or quests in between bigger drops of new areas, characters, and stories. Live-service games can take a lot of different forms, but the one thing they have in common is how easily they can eat away at your time. If you’re not careful, these games could steal entire days before you even realize it.

1 Warframe

Space ninjas with guns

There are few games that have transformed themselves over the years as much as Warframe has. When it first released, this game was little more than a third-person shooter with awesome movement, melee weapons, and tons of loot in short linear missions. Now you can fly your own spaceship, explore an open world, and even go fishing. At the heart of it all is still that fast, fluid, and euphoric movement system that lets you move through levels like a parkour master while blasting aliens with overpowered weapons and abilities. The grind for new frames — which are essentially new classes — never feels like a drag, because you’ll never get tired of repeating missions. It also helps that the team is so generous and fair with the monetization model, so you won’t ever feel pressured to spend real money.

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2 Final Fantasy 14

The WoW killer

MMORPGs, specifically World of Warcraft, invented the idea of a living game. These were the first types of games where you were given a massive world with enough content packed inside to waste away hundreds of hours. WoW set the template of keeping players subscribed with massive expansions, and no other game could compete — not even Final Fantasy 14. Not until it remade itself, at least. The current form of FF14, starting with the Realm Reborn expansion, is the best MMORPG on the market without question. Each expansion adds hours of new story content, jobs, raids, events, systems, and changes that the developers have to host hours-long streams just to explain the balance changes. If you haven’t started FF14, you have so much content ahead of you it could easily last a few years.

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3 League of Legends

Stop feeding

If you’re going to play a MOBA, you basically have two choices: DOTA 2 or League of Legends. Both fit the live-service bill, but I can’t deny that League has far better support. This game is getting updates on a near-weekly basis and already has hundreds of characters and cosmetics to earn and play. Unlike a lot of other live-service games, though, MOBAs don’t change a ton besides the characters. You won’t get any new story, maps, or modes, but if you love the core gameplay as much as the thousands of people playing every day do, then you probably don’t want it to be changed that much anyway.

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4 Fortnite

Winner winner

As obvious as it is, I can’t make a list of live-service games without including the king of them all. Fortnite is such a successful live-service game that it has become a platform for other games and events inside of it. The key to its success is so simple but still genius when you consider how many others have tried and failed to replicate it. It is available everywhere, for free, with a bright and appealing artstyle, hundreds of skins from every major media franchise, and makes massive changes each season. It isn’t afraid to completely flip the table on how the game works for a few weeks and see what happens. It also introduced a battle pass and nails the daily challenge system so you always feel like you’re working towards something cool even if you can’t win that chicken dinner.

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5 Honkai Star Rail

Get your gacha

JRPGs and live-service games don’t sound like a good mix, but miHoYo has one secret ingredient up its sleeve: amazing character designs. Just like Genshin Impact, Star Rail is basically an entire single-player game for free with no strings attached. However, there are dozens of characters you won’t have access to unless you grind or pay to roll for using the gacha system. This can be frustrating for some, but there is an undeniable bit of excitement that comes from the random chance of unlocking that one character you want to add to your team so badly. If that’s not for you, it’s very easy to ignore and just go through the story and explore the world as new updates add more areas and quests. You never have to pay for that core content, making it one of the most generous live-service games out there.

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