Step 5 of 5

Your first sessions, and keeping it a hobby

The last step is about what happens after the account exists: the shape of the first hour, how to read your own early experience honestly, and how to leave the thing in a sensible place in your week.

The shape of the first hour

Almost every online PC game opens the same way, and knowing the sequence removes most of the uncertainty.

First the client is obtained from the publisher's own site or from a store, and installed. Then the client usually updates itself, sometimes substantially, before it will start — this is normal and is why the first evening is often mostly waiting. Then you sign in with the account you made in Step 3. Then there is a configuration screen, a tutorial of some kind, and finally the game proper.

Plan for that first evening to be setup rather than play. People who expect to be playing within ten minutes are reliably disappointed, and people who expect an hour of installation and configuration are reliably pleasantly surprised. Nothing has gone wrong if the first session is mostly a progress figure moving slowly.

The settings worth changing immediately

Before the tutorial, open the options screen. Four things are worth attending to in any online game, and they take five minutes together.

Visual settings. If Step 2 told you that your machine sits between minimum and recommended, set the quality preset to a low or medium option now rather than waiting for the game to stutter. You can raise it later. Starting low and raising is far less frustrating than starting high and diagnosing.

Sound. Set the overall volume to something sensible before the first loud thing happens, especially if other people are in the room.

Communication. This is the one people skip. Find the chat and voice settings and decide what is on. Whether strangers can message you, whether voice is active by default, whether text chat is shown at all — these are the settings that determine what the environment feels like, and Step 4 explains why they matter more than they look.

Controls. Skim the key bindings once so you know where to find them. You do not need to change anything; you need to know the screen exists.

Learning the loop

Every game has a loop: the small cycle of activity you repeat. In a team-based online game it is usually a round of play, then a return to some kind of menu, workshop or garage where you spend what you earned, then another round.

Games built around constructed vehicles work this way and make the second half of the loop unusually prominent. Crossout's vendor describes it as a free-to-play MMO vehicle-combat game set in post-apocalyptic realities, in which the central activity is building a vehicle from parts — shape, armour, armament, support systems and accessories — and modifying both its appearance and its parameters. In a game of that kind, the time spent outside combat, assembling something, is not a side activity; for many players it is the main one.

The practical advice for a first session in any game with a building component is to use whatever the game gives you before trying to improve it. New players routinely spend an hour constructing something elaborate, take it into a match, and discover that they have no idea yet what makes a design work. Play a few rounds with the default first, then build. The hour will be better spent and you will know what you are building towards.

Visit the Crossout website Paid affiliate link. Quiet Concept's publisher is paid a commission if you create and confirm an account after following it; the price to you is the same, and the advice above applies to any game with a building component.

Why early matches feel lopsided

Expect to lose for a while. This is worth saying because new players often read early losses as evidence that something is wrong with them, their machine, or the game's fairness, when the ordinary explanation is simpler.

Matchmaking puts you with and against other players. In a game that has been running for years, many of those players have been playing for years, and systems that separate newcomers from veterans work imperfectly, especially in smaller player populations and at hours when fewer people are online. In Australia that last point is real: the local evening may not be the busiest time on servers located elsewhere, which can mean broader matches.

None of this is a reason to buy anything. Early difficulty is a feature of being new, and it is precisely the moment at which an in-game offer is most tempting and least informative. Step 4's suggestion of spending nothing in the first month exists mainly for this fortnight.

A reasonable first fortnight

Judging the game, honestly

After a week you have something no review can give you: direct experience of this game on your machine, with your connection, at the hours you actually play. Three questions extract most of the value from it.

Did you want to come back? Not "did you come back" — games are good at producing return visits through daily rewards. Did you look forward to it? That distinction is the single most useful signal available to you.

Did the game run acceptably? If it stuttered constantly, revisit the settings before concluding anything about the game itself. Many first impressions are really impressions of a quality preset that was too high.

Did the shop start to feel necessary? If, by the end of week one, progress felt gated in a way that made purchase feel less like an option than a requirement, that is worth naming clearly. It may still be a game you enjoy. But it tells you which of Step 1's four categories this publisher is really selling.

Keeping it a hobby

Online games are built to recur, and most of the structures that do this are harmless in themselves. Daily rewards, streaks and limited-time events are enjoyable. They become a problem only when the schedule starts belonging to the game rather than to you.

Two habits keep the balance. Decide when a session ends before it starts — a clock time works better than a number of matches, because matches have a way of multiplying. And treat a missed daily reward as entirely acceptable. A game that makes you feel you cannot skip an evening has made a claim on your time that you did not agree to.

For a household with younger players, the same logic applies with an added element: agreed times work better than argued ones, and the agreement is easier to reach before the game is installed than after. The eSafety Commissioner publishes free material for families about online gaming, including how to approach conversations about time and about contact with other players.

If you ever want to report serious online abuse encountered in a game, eSafety's site explains what can be reported and how. If something appears to be a scam rather than abuse — a fake offer, a fraudulent trade, an account-theft attempt — Scamwatch is where reports go.

Updates, pauses and leaving

Online games update, sometimes weekly. Updates are obtained through the client itself; there is no reason to seek a game update from anywhere other than the publisher or the store you installed from, and a site offering one elsewhere should be treated with suspicion. The Australian Cyber Security Centre publishes general guidance about keeping software current and about where software should come from.

Pausing is unremarkable. An account persists; you can stop for six months and return. Expect the game to have changed when you do, and expect the client to need a substantial update.

Leaving properly has two halves, and people usually do only the first. Removing the client frees the disk space. The account, however, still exists on the publisher's servers with whatever information you gave it. If you want that record removed, the publisher's privacy policy will say how to ask — this is the contact detail Step 3 suggested noting down. In Australia, the OAIC publishes general guidance on access and correction rights and on making a privacy complaint, which is the right source if a request is refused or ignored.

That is the end of the course. You began not knowing what a free-to-play PC game was; you can now read a requirements list, make an account you control, look up a classification, set a spending limit, and judge a game from your own sessions. Nothing here required a purchase, and the checklists are yours to print and reuse for the next title, and the one after that.