MMDOC part 2: The good, the bad, the dying card game

I've played a great deal of Might and Magic: Duel of Champions in the last few weeks, and I've come to terms with three things. First, MMDOC is at its core some of the best CCG design I've ever played and I hope people steal their ideas. Second, the game designers who are currently working on it seem divided down the middle between actually "getting it" and just making horrible formats. Lastly, the game is dying and playing is rather bittersweet.

The game managed a small bump in player base following the huge overhaul to its gui, formats and economic system, then returned on its downward spiral into oblivion. I will go over the reasons the game might be dying at the end, but I kinda want to talk about what the game does well and what it doesn't do well.

First and foremost - since this is ostensibly a review blog - I have to strictly say no, you should not start playing MMDOC. It has been over a month since the last major patch, going on two, and the developers have reacted with reluctance, ambivalence and open hostility to feedback. I feel like MMDOC is akin to recommending someone play Magic Online, except with worse community interaction on the official forums and a better client. And the fact it is hard to imagine a game that is shedding players at a tremendous rate is going to be around for much longer.

F2P games are extremely reliant on both critical mass and the "certainty of longevity" I suppose. As the player base continues to dwindle, it becomes difficult to imagine that the revenue stream can keep up, as without new players you won't find new whales and without players keeping the queues going players will just play less and less til they quit. As that feeling of dread sets in the mouse doesn't want to go to the cash shop.

But let's talk about the good, before we get really negative:

Greenlight is the perfect company to the indie paradigm

Indie, you see, has the airy pretension of a certain innate right to call itself art. And there are basically two metrics by which art is allowed to consider itself successful. The first is commercial success, but never too far, because anything that makes enough money loses the second metric. The second is suffering.

Civ casualties are a non-issue: Syndicate

I'm not sure I'm entirely rational when it comes to people's anger over remakes. XCom got remade recently, and although I'm told the game is good - a friend bought me it but I just couldn't make myself play it for more than a boring hour - it angers me richly. A fine bubbling brew of rage. But on the other hand, when other people get angry, I just don't have any sympathy. The explicit nature of Intellectual Properties is to create branding that attracts attention. If you're making value judgments about the outcome of a product, you worry about the studio that is making it or you worry about the individuals behind it. The actual 'brand' has limited meaning, and the willingness of gamers to get super hyped about IPS dulls my sympathy for their pain.

But yeah, the XCom remake, in spite of being good, still angers me. Good figure. Go figure. Actually maybe that's why it makes me mad.

Syndicate is a FPS, though it falls more towards the goofy future shooter genre than the military sim genre. I feel sometimes like there's only three aspects of shooters and all games are just somewhere between the holy trinity of the Doom, the Deus Ex and the Call of Doot Doot Doot. That's incorrect, but you can place 90% of them on the graph. Syndicate is ever so near the deus ex. That's not much of a surprise, since the one might have inspired the other, though I'd have to go look that up and I'm just not doing that.

Like Deus Ex - HR mind, I didn't have a computer capable of running the original during the hey day of that particular game - you play a super-soldier augmented with technology, though I don't think they call it augments in this game. No, here everything is chips, with hacking and breaching chips and chipped guns, so forth, so on. The impact here is that your character has, much like DE:HR, abilities way outside just holding the trigger down and screaming at the top of your lungs.

Unlike DE:HR though, there's no stealth issues and civ casualties, as the tagline and your partner say, are a non-issue.