Legends of Code & Magic (CC05) - Feedback & Strategies

Neumann · September 3, 2018, 6:49am

reCurse:

And such has been the problem of many of the community contests so far. When you take inspiration from existing successful game genres, they work because they had a lot of time exploring and balancing their game, introducing just the right amount of mechanics to give a good array of meaningful choices to the players. It is simply not the case here. What little mechanics there were, ended up either useless (drain) or overpowered (lethal/ward), and always straightforward. In fact, playing out a game was almost deterministic in the decision making, which means depth was close to inexistant. It really was all about figuring out the flaws of the cards in a out-of-game fashion, which made for a rather boring game in practice. I don’t expect any human players would play it for long.

It is simply not possible to balance out so much complexity with the necessary depth in the context of a CG game, at least not without extensive prior play. I have repeated this multiple times in the past so I will spare the details. I would have actually 100% preferred a carbon copy of TES:Legends or Hearthstone instead, as the necessary tools to handle the imbalances and certain situations would have been at least available. And I suspect many design decisions were taken to cut mechanics to make it seemingly more accessible, but in practice it was misguided, instead just killing a lot of the necessary depth and tools for experts that beginners could have just simply easily ignored with no harm.

I am sorry if this is harsh criticism, but I hope my intent to be constructive comes across as such. I am still hoping for either a return to more classical CG games, or fully embracing the depth and complexity of a game genre, but not the in-betweens I’ve seen so far.

Amen ! Put this in the CC whitepaper for next contests please.

Great PM, thanks

Magus · September 3, 2018, 7:03am

I agree. For all the reasons you give.