Games that focus on battle pass-based progression are becoming more and more common within the gaming industry.

With the rise of free-to-play gaming, games as a service, and gaming streaming services, battle passes have a greater influence over your gaming experience.

But how do battle passes actually affect your gaming experience, and are these changes avoidable? Let's take a look.

The Ways Video Game Battle Passes Alter How You Play

Battle passes can affect how you play in a few different areas. While not always wholly negative, some changes are quite drastic. Let's take a look at two key ways battle passes can change your gaming experience.

Battle Passes Change How You Progress Through Games

With the core factors of how battle passes work within gaming providing a tier system of progressively more difficult unlockable digital content, you may find your sense of progression to be altered.

With each tier requiring more experience points, or whatever progression currency the title uses, progressing through a battle pass can feel like an uphill struggle.

When compared to the standard model of progression for gaming, the method of using ascending amounts of experience points may sound familiar to more classic leveling systems.

With battle passes, however, this model is adapted to run over a certain period, with the game expecting players to progress through the entire pass within a time frame or risk losing unlocks.

This makes the uphill struggle of battle pass progression more like an uphill race rather than something you could constantly work towards whenever you play.

Having a Battle Pass System Guarantees Monetization

The fact that battle passes, at their core, rely upon monetization means that your gaming experience, regardless of actual gameplay quality, could be hindered by paywalls that affect how you play.

By simply having a premium battle pass option, as all free-to-play battle passes do, games will be locking away content that could otherwise be unlocked by playing the game.

Battle passes could limit how rewarding playing a title may be, while also encouraging you to spend money on unlocking worthwhile rewards.

So, the monetization associated with battle passes alters how you are rewarded for your play, limiting it, while also encouraging you to spend money on the game itself, representing drastic and negative changes to your gameplay experience.

Do Various Battle Passes Affect Gameplay Differently?

While there are staple effects of battle passes on your gaming experience, some battle passes can be seen as being better than others.

Some battle passes will provide you with unlockable premium currency within the free pass that you could then use to purchase the premium pass for free, circumventing the troublesome changes represented by monetization.

Others will offer massive experience points dumps for specific challenge completions, usually on a weekly basis, that help alleviate the changes to your sense of progression.

Games like Fortnite, Smite, and Fall Guys all utilize aspects of the above factors to help accommodate for the intrusive changes battle passes can have on your gaming experience.

Of course, not all battle-pass-centered games are this generous, so you may have to explore the varying factors of a title's battle pass before committing your time to the game.

Can You Avoid Having Your Gameplay Experience Altered by Battle Passes?

Unfortunately, due to the connections between battle pass systems and free-to-play gaming's reliance on monetization, attempting to avoid the gameplay-altering effects of battle passes is incredibly difficult.

While you can utilize the above reliefs, like experience challenges and free premium currency, the effects of monetization are ingrained in free-to-play gaming and by association, battle passes.

Because of this, while it may not be possible to completely avoid the gameplay-altering factors of battle passes, learning whether predatory microtransactions in free-to-play games are worthwhile may help you identify its shortcomings.

Battle Passes Alter Your Gaming Experience Unavoidably

With the changes to progression and the monetization of your gaming experience, the alterations battle passes represent are ingrained and unavoidable.

Not only do they change how you play by simply existing within a title, but they also intrusively encourage the purchasing of microtransactions.

The best way to navigate how battle passes alter your experience is by finding the right kind of battle pass and understanding how they may affect you.

And while the issues of monetization can be traversed through the understanding of their predatory nature, your sense of progression and its relation to battle passes and free-to-play gaming may benefit you similarly.