Category explainer

Battle collection role-playing games, explained

Most of the desktop titles people bring troubleshooting questions about belong to one category, and understanding how that category is built explains a surprising amount about how it behaves on a machine, how it is funded, and what it will ask of you over time.

Quick answer

A battle collection role-playing game gives you a roster of characters rather than a single protagonist, and progress comes from improving that roster as much as from advancing through content. Combat is usually turn-based, which makes these games unusually tolerant of a slow connection and unusually demanding of storage and patience. Most are free to begin and sell optional content afterwards, which is the fact that matters most before you install one.

What the category actually is

The defining feature is the roster. Instead of controlling one character who grows over the course of a story, you assemble a group, and the interesting decisions are about which members to take into a given encounter and which to invest limited resources in. A player two hundred hours in is not primarily further through a story than a new player; they have a deeper bench.

That design choice has consequences that run through everything else. Content has to be built for many possible team compositions rather than one, so encounters tend to reward preparation over reflexes. Progress has to be measured in something other than chapters, so these games track many parallel forms of advancement at once. And because a roster can always be deeper, the games are built to be returned to rather than finished.

The four building blocks

The roster: A collection of characters with distinct abilities, acquired over time. Acquisition is usually the part that is monetised, and it is usually randomised to some degree — you obtain a chance at a character rather than a specific one.
Layered progression: Characters gain levels, equipment, upgrades to that equipment, and often upgrades to the upgrades. This layering is what allows a game to absorb hundreds of hours without producing hundreds of hours of new content, and it is why a new player and a long-standing one can be in the same content with wildly different results.
Session pacing: Many titles in the category limit how much can be done in a sitting, through a resource that refills over time. The design intent is a game played in short regular sessions rather than long ones, and it is the reason these games suit a desktop left running alongside other things.
Separated modes: A campaign against the game's own opposition, repeatable challenge content such as dungeons, cooperative encounters against a single large opponent, and some form of competition against other players' rosters. Each mode rewards different characters, which is what keeps the roster relevant.

What the category asks of a desktop machine

These games are generally lighter on graphics hardware than action titles of the same age, because turn-based combat does not demand a high frame rate to feel correct. A machine that struggles with a fast shooter may run one of these comfortably. That is the good news, and it is genuine.

The demands sit elsewhere. Storage is the first: a roster of hundreds of characters, each with its own models, effects and voice recordings, produces a large installation that grows with every content update. Our install page covers why a download that fails near the end is so often a disk space question rather than a network one.

The second is memory, because these games are typically left open alongside a browser and a chat application, and the category's session pacing actively encourages that pattern. The third is time, which is not a technical requirement but is the one most often underestimated. A game designed around returning daily is asking for something a machine cannot supply.

Why latency matters less here

Turn-based combat resolves on the server and reports the result. A delay of a fraction of a second between action and response, which would be intolerable in a fast-action game, is barely noticeable when the underlying interaction is a series of discrete turns. For a player in Australia connecting to servers hosted overseas, this makes the category unusually forgiving — the baseline delay described on our connection page is present, and mostly does not matter.

How these games are funded

The dominant model is free to begin, with optional purchases afterwards. Those purchases typically fall into three groups: accelerators that reduce waiting, convenience features that remove repetitive tasks, and chances at new roster members. The third group is the one that draws the most scrutiny, because what is bought is an attempt rather than an outcome.

Whether any specific title uses any of these, and on what terms, is a question for that title's own store page — it is a fact about a product that changes over time, and we do not restate it here. What is worth knowing in advance is the shape of the model, so that the first purchase prompt is not the moment you learn how the game is funded. Our purchases and refunds page covers what to do when a payment goes wrong, and the controls worth setting up before one does.

One title in this category

Vantage Portal has a commercial relationship with the advertiser for Raid: Shadow Legends, which is a desktop title in this category, and it is therefore the specific product this site links to. Describing it accurately means describing only what the vendor's own material states.

That material describes assembling an alliance of champions and leading them through a brutal world, with dungeons, clan boss encounters, and a fully voiced campaign across twelve locations; it characterises the combat as tactical player-versus-environment play in which choices matter, within the battle collection role-playing genre. The distribution material lists desktop clients for Windows, macOS and Linux. The path after the link is described as registering on the landing page, installing the game, and starting the tutorial.

Everything else — system requirements, the detail of how the game is funded, what it has been classified, how large the installation is — is published by the vendor and by the relevant authorities. We have not been given those details and will not guess at them, so the vendor's own site is where to read them.

Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website

Paid link. If you follow it, register and install, the advertiser pays KOKSAKI s.r.o. a commission. It costs you nothing additional, and the commission did not decide anything written on this page — including the sections above about randomised purchases.

Questions worth answering before installing any of these

How much storage does the installation need now, and how much has it grown in the past year?
What is sold inside the game, and is any of it sold as a chance at an outcome rather than the outcome itself?
Does it require a daily commitment to remain viable, and is that a commitment you want?
Which sign-in method will you use, and is that account itself well protected?
Is there a server region near Australia, or will you be connecting overseas?

The readiness checklist extends this to the machine itself.

Classification and suitability

Games distributed in Australia are classified, and those decisions, along with the consumer advice recorded alongside them, are published by the Australian Classification Board. We do not state a classification for any title, because the Board's own database is the authoritative record and a second-hand claim about it would be worth nothing.

Where an adult is deciding on behalf of a young person, classification is the starting point rather than the whole answer. A game funded through randomised purchases raises a question about spending that a classification is not designed to settle, and it should not be assumed suitable for a child on the basis of its artwork or its price of entry. The eSafety Commissioner publishes guidance for parents and carers on young people's experiences online, which covers the social side of these games as well.