1800 CE (sometimes ~1400, sometimes from lootboxes) for a run split across the party isn't cheap, especially when the raw payout's not really competitive with existing stages even if you remove the cost entirely.

The material costs are a factor, and they would indeed crash in value if SLs were free to access, but unlike how Mist Energy and crafted-only UVs initially gave a lot of value to normal materials in underplayed stages as they're used for desirable equipment, there's little worth in the SL mats not tied to the keys used to acquire them... Only two of the five sets are worth making for statistical reasons, three if you squint at Heavenly Iron, and zero if you've already made Chaos/Kat. I suppose the lack of a recipe helps balance things out a bit vs. the key costs, but that doesn't leave much reason to play them continuously once you've already made what you want... except for fun, and it'd be nice for Arcade runs to have some relevancy again.

Yes, making SLs free to access wouldn't be enough to decentralize FSC, as with OCH after you've made all of its equipment, though being able to make and sell Perfect Seerus Masks does help a bit...

I'm certainly happy it means more people will be trying out the most fun sword in the game...

there's an announcement now, so yes it's intentional and the 1 energy is a bug.

@Draycos

Making SLs free would be a good move. SLs are a decent difficulty counter to endgame gear, and would give FSC farmers something new to chew on in terms of crown optimization vs time across all SL bosses.

@Thats-Rough-Buddy

Yep, fully agree. I think the SL changes that got pushed a few years back weren't great for gameplay reasons, and in terms of reward discussion, enemy health is way too bloated for time-to-payout ratio to keep up with the likes of Free Skeleton Crowns. Not like they can't crank the drop depth scaling way high to compensate, of course! Just saying they gotta do that too, not just open them up.

I'm glad OCH is open to everybody now, considering the sword and bomb are among the game's best-designed weapons (though I do wish Hammer's charge attack got looked at). The level design's aesthetically solid and encourages some unusual weapon choices to combat the Stalkers. Whatever they do to even out underpaying levels, hoping that extends to OCH too.

This is awesome! Newer players and any F2P veterans who just hadn't gotten around to it can now save their energy. From a bomber's perspective, the DR is one of the best bombs in the game, along with DBB and Electron Vortex, with no effective replacement. Allowing players to access it just by completing the tier 3 OCH mission at no extra cost will make bombing more accessible to the playerbase at large.

Great change. Thank you GH!

Honestly I had no idea OCH would ever become free.
I think it's a really nice touch.

I am pleased OCH is open to everyone, these are some of the most wonderfully designed levels without a doubt and really sell the worldbuilding and the crimson order.
That said, as far as I am aware, nothing was given to players who had bought the mission. No refund of energy (although then energy may dip even lower), no nice little cosmetic, nothing.
The fact that everyone has some stunning free 5* weapons takes a huge load off of hall of heroes' price tag though, and that is something I am very glad to see.
I'm also hoping that we get a new expansion someday, after all there are nine crimson order members and we've only seen two.

Seeing it go free is great after all this time (and a number of periodic sales had it down to peanuts anyway), but dang, sad to hear the expansion model is being dropped altogether. I actually thought the OCH model was very healthy as paid gameplay content; absolute zero regrets getting it on release.

I'm interested to see whether this will reflect on similar player-unfriendly cases the game's accumulated over the years, since OCH was certainly far more of a fair exchange than Shadow Lairs being charged per run, or gating unique equipment and even gameplay content behind unconscionably long grinds, low droprates and even lootboxes.

I'm all for having free accessible progression, but I'm really concerned how this will affect the server budget and the game's profitability, since the mission IS highly desired and probably serves as some slight source of income. I know it's not the MAIN source of income, Prize Boxes still come first, but I can't shake the feeling that this will one day come to bite us back and something ELSE will end up costing more.

It's a reasonable assumption that GH has purchase histories measuring where CE is being burnt and where money is spent.

SK history rambling time:
It's true that one-time purchases in a live service game only make business sense with continuous expansion and improvement, since that draws in new players or convinces existing players to pay. SK's always been held back by this where even the release model all but necessitated that people bought CE in order to experience all the content the game had to offer since it was required for crafting higher-rarity items. Huuuge reason it was critically panned and stayed small even in its 'golden age' with the Steam rerelease. The Forge progression changes were tailor-made to disguise this problem and magnify it severely at the same time, with orbs/crystals making players spend far more time with less variegation in stages for less returns. Restricted time and not much of a grind under Mist vs. unrestricted time but very restricted rewards and an order of magnitude more grind under the Forge. Easing up Radiant costs was a functionally small change with a good trajectory, and GH previously mentioned they were thinking of ways to address the FSC problem, so we'll see how things change here whenever that indeterminably happens.

We can observe the same problems manifesting in a much more adversarial way with the game's cosmetic systems, the meat of the income, where accessories are single-use with massive recovery costs, have obfuscated prices because they're often tied to random chance, and artificial scarcity / limited time windows encourage players to get more than they actually need since there's no guarantee those items will ever return. A wispy, moving target, baiting people to spend more than they would with fixed prices and permanent availability. Though the playercount is resurging with promises of 'Content Updates Eventually' and with the Forge being made a little less hostile, it's historically and presently evident that the focus shifted away from P2Ps and F2Ps subsidizing each other to build the game up, instead toward the game's existing population of hours-a-day players and whales, targeting addictions, FOMO, and other dark patterns. Development's officially continuing today in 2026, yet we've had multiple promos that haven't changed in strategy, with the most recent one costing real money where the odds of getting an accessory dwarfs the odds of getting a new costume helm/armor/shield... and they're almost all in random color variants, requiring you to trade with other players to get a palette swap you want or keep opening boxes. $50 for 14 boxes, by the way, and no official pity system!

There's a handful of points to be made here about how much more pro-consumer reusable accessories would be ala the Style Kit or consistent costumes like the various energy bundles over the years, which drove energy prices down so the freemium currency was more appealing for F2Ps to farm crowns in turn... where CE prices are already going down without them, presumably due to new/returning players not wanting to deal with the game's glacially slow grind over its very bottlenecked distribution of rewarding stages, even though there's been a handful of depot prize boxes and silly things like $50 single-use single-color pauldrons or a $200 player color. It's proof there's a number of players that really do just want to play the video game; orbs are a pain by design and crown costs are pretty steep starting fresh even if the player sticks to a single set. Raw crown costs from recipe and crafting alone for a single 2~5* item tally to 48,900cr, and you're outright required to make a set of weapon, helm, armor, shield as you advance in mandatory mission ranks. (A studious and dedicated player could metagame around some of that via FSC tokens and OCH's fixed weapon rewards, but that's a miserable way to play and very limited in scope...)

How many people would bite on cosmetic DLC if they got permanent accessory tickets they could use and reuse without cost, like costumes at large? Those have been some of my only purchases on this game ages ago, and they were worthy purchases. But that was when it was being continuously developed and (for the most part) improved before that slowed to a crawl. Because most of late SK's income is implicitly from people casually dropping literal hundreds of dollars opening boxes in public (sometimes for lootbox-exclusive equipment!) so people can 'ooh' and 'aah' at them where gambling's treated as a social activity, and vice versa the biggest crownsinks are also guild upkeep costs and gambling with UVs and Somnambulist totems, it's safe to say that SK progressively crutched on its dark patterns harder over its lifespan.

tl;dr it'd be neat to see the game live and thrive on moral means since there's demonstrably a market for it rather than jointly making a game and a bunch of slot machines attached to it. Hololite could've been a costume pack. Would be cool if that brightened up a bit if the mysterious upcoming content updates are handled well enough to support a paradigm shift like that by drawing in and retaining enough players by merit of a quality video game.

also selling usable equipment at a premium in the depot has always been wild to me; don't know if I like anything going on with the Depot besides not being RNG