Might and Magic Duel of Champions; A confused look at Time of Renewal

I've been playing MMDOC on and off for a year now. It actually holds the record for highest played game on my Steam account, although I'm not certain how much of that is owing to idling while chatting or waiting in queues as opposed to actually playing.

the weirdest lolicon

I'd been off MMDOC for a while when news that Ubisoft Montreal, the studio in charge of the game, was in some part dismantled and kicked off the project. While I don't necessarily respect the quality of their work, I did think they seemed like decent guys, so it is a pity if they lost their jobs for having the ill luck of competing in a market that rapidly changed with Hearthstone's arrival. Following that, I basically didn't pay any attention until news a "new" set was being released and would be ushered in by the "new" development team, BlueByte, known for their work on various not very good games, and Anno 2070, which I own but haven't played through yet.

There wasn't a lot promised with the new set. Most of the information came by way of the bizarre Chinese server. I always find it weird looking at news from Chinese versions of games, as the Chinese market seems to prefer women look extremely make up'd and rather chesty. What got really weird was looking through and finding art for twelve year old girls that look like this... Meanwhile they're not allowed to depict bones.

I guess on that end I'd fit right into China, the bones I mean, since I've never understood the love for the undead in modern fiction. Vampires, sure, but what is the deal with Zombies? And skeletons? Snore.

Crude photoshopping aside, the Chinese server continued to receive updates and new game modes while MMDOC was busy being transferred to BlueByte's domain, which is admittedly not a job I would want. Taking over major software productions is generally speaking brutal, thankless work, so I'm not trying to poop on the BB guys and/or gals. The "new" set, which was long since out in China, was finally set to show up on April the 15th. There was limited fanfare, and it finally rolled out of its cave...

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:

Top Five things I'm not going to miss about MMDOC's open format

So after getting trapped above 1000 elo and roughly forced to play against people with actual, serious decks, MMDOC became something of a surreal game. After a bit more grinding I realized I should probably either spend the resources I had, or just stop playing the game altogether, which seemed far from optimal.

I didn't exactly enter the tournament scene or something. I tried playing jackpot, but it was largely a waste of time, as apparently players imagine that with such prizes on the line they should ... Take about a million years to do anything. Given JP only pays out to a tier I'd probably not reach to justify playing it, I just went back to grinding ranked matches to keep piling up wildcards, which got me to around 1200~ rating, peaking at about 1300 or so but no higher.

At about 1200 you start to actually play against tournament decks, though they tend to be a mixed breed of people who probably got stuck just over 1500 and then legitimate good players. Good players with good decks mostly crushed me, which I guess is how it should be, but bad players were quite the mix.

So with the patch hitting tomorrow and my time playing open drawing entirely to a close (spoilers; it sucks and they're killing it) I thought I'd outline the five things I found most disappointing about playing at the higher levels. This isn't really a review, it is just me venting.

Consider it therapy, or a discussion of how game design can go bad.

Duel of Champions (MMDOC): Introductory thoughts

I like to pronounce it MMMdock.

I've played a fair number of card games over the years, and the rise of the "f2p" CCG market has interested me. I have a MTGO account but after a run of trying to enjoy it a couple years back I realized that magic, online, is just not really a good translation. A friend has dragged me kicking and screaming back into real life Magic, which is actually great since we happened to bumble into a comic store in Oakville - a one Comic Connection - and the store is just fantastic, with a really great location and an awesome owner. So I do actually play Magic via Duels of the Planeswalkers and now in real life, but not on MTGO, because it's awful. I've had conversations with other players and many of them agree that regardless of the convenience of drafting without pants, MTGO is simply too terrible a platform to sink money into. Not that everyone feels that way.

Anyway so I do get the card playing bug here and there, and the MMDOC thread has floated around on the front page of Games on SA for a while. I'd read bits and pieces of the thread for a while, and recently it came up that the game would be launching an 'easier to get into' new base set with a new format centered on that set. Figuring what the Hell, I finally installed the game and gave it a try. This is a review of the game before the new base set launches and I'll explain why I started playing

I should mention that yes, there is a HoMM sucks now tag and yes, I have found Ubisoft's attempt at the franchise rather miserable. I haven't tried 6 yet, but the dev videos made it look somewhere between awfully generic, pointless watered down and incredibly weeaboo. I've played about a thousand hours of HoMM3 and I've always found it sad that the franchise has been treated so cruelly, but I'm not going to hold it against this game. Or even six, really, it just hasn't been cheap enough to bother playing a game that is supposedly super buggy.

I do admit that I really don't understand why they bought the IP only to basically use little beyond the name. MMDOC doesn't remind me, IP wise, of Homm3 at all.

Grinding on that tower like a pop music video: Prime World Defenders

I'm a big fan of Tower defense games as what I mentally refer to as "coffee games". Games you can pour your first copy of coffee and then play while you slowly savor your home-brewed, fresh ground steaming beverage. As such, this is going to slant this review in sort of a weird manner, because Prime World Defenders is a tower defense game that gained things by losing it.

PW:D is made by Nival Entertainment, who I don't know overly much about. I believe "Prime World" is a brand for their grouping of products, though I haven't looked into any of the other ones there's at least two more. Nival apparently did some of Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I found incredibly boring. I have something like a thousand hours logged in HoMM3 and quite a few in HoMM4 even, so I was rather surprised to find HoMM5 incredibly dull and not at all what I was looking for. I'm not going to hold it against Nival though, since I have no idea how much of it was their fault. Ubisoft continued to plow on, with the next developer further simplifying odd elements of the game and adding weeaboo shit. Do you really think people who have trouble with turn based strategy games have trouble with things like hexes and the fact there's multiple currencies? People don't have trouble figuring out how different monies work. We're capitalists. Money is 90% of what we do!

Anyway, as I said, Prime World: Defenders is a tower defense game, but with something of a twist that takes over a great deal of its gameplay and resources. That twist is free to play style grinding, though as far as I can tell there are no in application purchases in PW:D. Maybe f2p is the wrong description, but it feels like someone had some good ideas vis-a-vis f2p CCGs and then grafted those ideas onto a tower defense game.

It's sort of interesting because whether or not you like this game likely starts and finishes right from the question of whether or not you can appreciate a very upfront and obvious skinner box. Actually, to be frank, the game is probably a hybrid of the core gameplay of a tower defense with the addictive spicing of a Diablo game on top of it. Does that sound good?

March out of RPG month: King's Bounty, Warriors of the North

Sequels are a nice thing. (Sometimes)

The first recent King's Bounty game, King's Bounty: The Legend, is one of those little fist pump moments Steam has brought to me. Like a fair number of old school gamers, one of my favorite games is Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which King's Bounty has a claim in the lineage of. HoMM4 was fine, but not as good, then HoMM5 just felt off somehow.  I didn't play enough of HoMM5 to really nail it down, but I know for a fact that HoMM games are supposed to take place on a hex map. I realize that sounds awfully specific and nit-picky, but the way units line up, block and defend is at the core of why I enjoy HoMM games. Getting the positioning juuuuust right and so on ... Just what makes the game "good" to me. HoMM5 didn't do that, and instead combat felt weird and I almost want to say floaty. Not floaty in the genuine pseudo physical lack of feedback feeling you get in an action game, but the step after, where your brain tries to process through the floatiness.

KB:TL stepped up to fill the hole in my heart. I bought it for 7.50. containing all of the (at the time) newly made KB content. My understanding is that KB:TL and Armored Princess are only KB games through purchasing the name, but I just enjoyed them so much I barely care. They're very HoMM-like, but in many ways discard the elements that make the game feel less story-driven than they should. Admittedly, AP is a worse game than TL, and then it has later revisions and expansions that in turn just make it even worse. Crossworlds was such an awful edition, at least to single player. Does this game have multiplayer? I don't even begin to know.

But then they released another sequel - Or more or less a campaign, packaged as its own thing. I gotta admit that there's only a handful of series I get excited about seeing new releases in - Crysis, for one. The Witcher 2 got me pretty hyped, and I guess I'm a bit interested to see how SimCity 5 is going to be. There's probably more but if I can't think of them. So another KB game, I'm hyped, etc.

Since it's almost impossible for me to dislike this game I'm going to be a bit more general about King's Bounty games, the more recent ones, and talk about why I really like them and the stuff I find sort of strange about watching the shift as modern influences drive their way into a game clearly made to follow up Heroes of Might and Magic 3. HoMM3 is, of course, always going to be a game that people go back to - It's a classic with enduring graphic quality, excellent soundwork and mostly a very good UI.

KB games take from that very intimately. In much the way a rip-off is called a loving homage if its a quality production...