After a full year and a hundred dollars' worth of expansions, Destiny finally feels like the game I always wanted it to be; a first-person-shooter take on Diablo’s endless loot-grabbing escalation. The Taken King, Destiny's third, biggest, and most well-received expansion to date, finally fixed many of the problems present since the game’s initial launch last year, and it is much more entertaining as a result

But while Destiny is enjoying significant critical and player acclaim, there’s a largely under-appreciated game that did Destiny-style gameplay better than Destiny—and years earlier, to boot. No, I’m not talking about Hellgate: London. I’m talking about Warframe, a free-to-play third-person shooter that came out years ago.

Warframe mirrors Destiny in many ways, not the least of which is the game's bizarre tale of development. Originally announced as Dark Sector nearly 15 years ago, Warframe was meant to be a followup to Unreal Tournament, which Digital Extremes had co-developed with Epic Games. That idea was quickly scrapped, but Dark Sector remained, albeit dormant. Four years later, a reworked video demo of Dark Sector was shown as a first look at what the upcoming PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 could do. That makes it the first game publicly announced for the seventh generation of game consoles.

This 2004 demo was more like the Warframe we know today: Space ninjas, clone soldiers, and powered armor like a pared-down version of Evangelion were all present, even back then. Even the space marines' gams have that catwalk-ready look that we'd see in their full glory when Warframe went into open beta in 2012, more than a decade after the name Dark Sector was first mentioned on Digital Extremes' website.

In Warframe, as in Destiny, you play a nameless, class-based super-soldier empowered with space magic. You patrol the planets of our solar system (Earth, Venus, Mars—you may have heard of them), each controlled by one of a few factions, which you expunge in repeatable content to earn loot and better prepare your trooper for MMO-style raids.

Both games are focused on cooperative play. They both have obscure lore that gives the impression of depth. They are the video game equivalent of the same car accident as explained by two different witnesses.

Free as in time

The differences found in the telling are subtle but also very important. The most obvious is that unlike Destiny, Warframe is free to play. This has helped make the game a bigger hit than most gamers realize; it occupies that very strange category of "free-to-play PC titles you probably didn’t know were quite this popular," alongside World of Tanks and all of the MOBAs you don't play. Warframe consistently hovers in and around the top 10 most-played games on Steam. On more global stat-tracking services like Raptr, it breaches the top 20, and on the PlayStation Network it was once second only to Netflix.

Warframe isn’t one of those free-to-play games that forces you to spend money, either. The game is actually relatively generous to players who don’t want to spend anything but free time. Basic weapons, armor, and cosmetics can be bought with real currency, but the top-tier of equipment, "prime" gear, must be earned in-game or through limited offers. Warframe used to offer these loot drops much more generously than Destiny, but The Taken King expansion has helped close that gap.

Any level in Warframe (which includes stages on every planet in our system and several moons compared to Destiny’s selection of four locales) can be played as often as you like. This allows you to farm bosses and stages just as in the overhead RPGs it seeks to emulate. It eschews Destiny's daily and weekly resets, which seem designed to artificially stretch the game between each batch of new content.

And while Destiny charges serious money for its major expansions, Warframe’s new content—story missions, modes, features—is entirely free as part of regular major updates. Every time a new update lands, I check back in to see what bizarre new channels the game has navigated this time. Since its open beta, those changes have been considerable. Digital Extremes has added new features, ranging from space combat to canine comrades to public zones. There are now even Monster Hunter-esque pursuits for special targets across different zones.

Did I mention all of this has been free?

What’s new is old again

This is especially impressive when you consider what Destiny has offered in its $100 worth of expansions. With a few exceptions, Destiny's first two expansions were mostly composed of new reasons to fight the same enemies in the same locations as before. They were also pricey for a game that many believe was light on content in the first place, especially when you consider that each of them removes features from the base game for players who don't upgrade.

This isn't to say that Warframe is better that Destiny in every way. Destiny, for all its faults, has a great deal of development money behind it—money that can be spent on fixing bugs (eventually), as well as making the game look and feel great. By comparison, Warframe's procedurally generated maps can become just as tiresome as Bungie's beautifully static interpretations of Mars and the moon. Warframe also folds in a number of free-to-play hooks to goad impatient players; farming crafting materials in particular is an unbelievable slog if you don’t want to pay real money.

But Warframe doesn't really hide these drawbacks. From the moment the opening tutorial starts, you're shown exactly what you're getting yourself into. If you don't like it, you can back away with no strings attached (and no money spent). This definitely was not true for those who played Destiny in its first year. They paid in again and again, only to find that those who waited got the keystone expansion on the same day as those who didn't, gaining the rest of the content effectively for free.

After years of cracking jokes about the ways free-to-play was ruining games, it's strange to think that it's actually full-priced titles that are sometimes harder to believe in these days. Games like Warframe, Hearthstone, and Dota 2 offer hundreds or even thousands of hours of enjoyable play without requiring the player to spend a cent. These games are obviously working in a business sense, but they also work well in terms of player satisfaction.

While many new game ideas see a free-to-play clone swoop in after a premium game has proven the concept, Warframe’s free-to-play model actually outdid Destiny before Destiny was even a thing. Developers and publishers may finally be reaching a point where the "new" business models have gotten old enough to replace their predecessors in a way that respects players while still making money. Meanwhile, pricey, slow-burn drip-feeds like Destiny are starting to ruin our faith in the old way of selling games.