There's a lot to cover, so let's get started!
Design Team Blog
If you're reading this now, then you've found our blog, which launched whilst most of the Design Team were at the Origins Game Fair. I hope you enjoyed the coverage posted by my fellow Design Team members on the experiences they had there. Due to other commitments, I was unable to attend Origins, so that's why you've not heard from me until now!
With everyone back now, we'll be using this blog to talk about more traditional Design Team subjects like the forthcoming expansion, our design process, our vision for the game, and anything else we can think of that you might be interested in. Which brings us nicely onto ...
World Championships
Last weekend saw the culmination of a ten-week journey for more than 100 players, which began with a 200+ player swiss-style tournament and ended with a 32-player single-elimination Grand Finals where iClipse became the new World Champion, using somewhat of a surprise a hero: Zhanna Mist.
It seems like no one saw Ms. Mist coming
Whilst organising the event was not a Design Team task - I did it wearing my OOPS (Official Organised Play Specialist) hat, which is definitely the second best hat in Shadow Era, regardless of what the polls might tell you - I'd likely to briefly touch on it here, from a Design Team perspective.
It should go without saying that a thriving tournament scene is essential for the success of a TCG like Shadow Era, and, indeed, that is why so many fans of the game volunteer their own time to run events. But all their hard work can only go so far, if the game itself is unbalanced and stale, and more dependent on luck than skill.
This is why the first task we were entrusted with, when our team was formed in December 2011, was to review the 175 released cards so far, and the 25 as-yet-untested cards that had been designed by the previous Design Team, and make whatever modifications were required to end up with a finalised 200-card set that the development team and the dedicated player base could be proud of.
During that process, the expected impact on the highest-level of competition was always in our minds. Whilst I would argue that enjoyment for all players is the ultimate goal for any game, it is the competitive players who really determine its lifespan. As soon as the set was released digitally as v1.5 in March, our eyes were on the ratings ladder, the many player-run tournaments that were happening, and, of course, the Shadow Era forums, looking for signs that we'd achieved our quality aims and avoided catastrophe.
Three months on, 1.2 million games had been played with v1.5 on the live server, experienced players had had the chance to get to know the set inside-out, and we'd seen no signs of anything being broken. But if anything was going to really test whether we'd achieved decent balance, and variety, it would be the World Championships, since this is where you'd expect to see the most broken of decks unleashed.
Needless to say, Francis did not make it to the Grand Finals this year.
Thankfully, there was no such unleashing ... or table-flipping ... that I was aware of :)
Instead, as a Design Team, we have been given a lot of encouragement that the approach we took to finalising the set had worked as intended. There were a wide variety of heroes in use in the Grand Finals, and there were many closely fought games - some of them epic!
Based on what happened that weekend, and in the many tournaments preceding it, we can say with confidence that we have a solid foundation to build on, both in terms of card pool and development process. Both of which will be invaluable for ...
Shadow Era's First Expansion
This is probably the thing we are asked about most right now. Players are keen for any kind of spoilers, and we'd love to give them, but whilst we have 150 cards designed, we have not yet tested them. Therefore, giving out card spoilers at this time is just not possible. We do have plans for other types of spoilers over the coming weeks, but we are restraining ourselves on card spoilers until we have finalised versions of the cards we wish to spoil.
Many players hope the first expansion will provide an answer to arguably the
only overpowered card from Call of the Crystals that slipped through the net.
And we're trying to get to that point as soon as possible! It's for this reason we are again enlisting the services of ...
The Players' Focus Group
For those of you who don't know what the PFG is, it's a group of experienced and insightful Shadow Era players who are given early access to new versions of the game to help us to achieve higher quality than if we just went live with what we'd designed without having player input. Ideally, the PFG will help us to pre-empt all major issues that would have otherwise been found by end users instead - when it would be too late to address them. Of course, we still have the Test Server as a safety net, if the PFG and Design Team miss something, but that's really meant for implementation testing rather than finding errors in card design.
To say that the first PFG was instrumental in the success of the finalised first set would be a massive understatement, so using the same approach for the first expansion is a no-brainer. That said, you might have heard or seen that there were some effectiveness issues with PFG1, so we've applied lessons learned from there to make us even more productive this time around.
So far, things are going very well, but the fun really begins when we start play-testing! Unfortunately, that date has been delayed quite severely over the past three months, due to Wulven's focus on launching the physical version of the game. Thankfully, the PFG members have had the aforementioned World Championships to keep them busy (iClipse clearly embraced that opportunity!), and the Design Team have been able to get stuck into ...
The Single Player Campaign
For as long as I can remember, players have been asking for an improved offline story mode, but it's never become a high enough priority to invest development time into. It's the online player-vs-player Challenge mode that really makes Shadow Era special - this is a TCG after all!
Meanwhile, for about the same length of time, the Shadow Era community as a whole has expressed an interest in finding out more about the game world and its inhabitants, and the story that sets the stage for all the bloodshed. In other words, the fans want some lore!
So, when there was some Design Team downtime due to the physical cards work, we had the option to either take advantage of the time to address these areas or slack off for a few months. Needless to say, we chose the latter, so the single player campaign and story have not gone anywhere.
Joking, of course! Driven mainly by an unstoppable stream of background story being written by NachyoChez, who joined the team to focus on story and lore in February, we have been able to devise a much-improved offline story mode which will deliver an absorbing and challenging single player experience, with generous helpings of lore and hero backstory. Work has not yet started on implementation, but we are getting very close to that point.
I can't say much more than that right now, but more details will follow over the coming weeks, along with news on ...
Other New Features
Aside from the first expansion and the single player campaign, the other high priority additions to the game that are being worked on at the moment are organized play support within the game client, in the form of automated tournament queues, booster draft and Meltdown format - so that I can finally hang up my OOPS hat! - and an auction house, for pseudo trading between players. As well as these features, there are plans to address some of the smaller lower priority improvements that people regularly request, so I have recently been collating them to feed into our feature roadmap.
I will share more details when he have clearer estimates of when these features will go live. The emphasis is very much on the first expansion now though, since growing the card pool will exponentially improve the deck-building options and gameplay variety you face, and, in turn, your enjoyment of the game - whether you play digitally or physically :)
Until next time, this is GondorianDotCom signing out!
Thanks for the article! As always I enjoy reading about the creative process behind SEra.
ReplyDelete