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.

Back to forming plats and stuff: Rogue Legacy

So a couple of weeks back I finished up my write up on Guacamelee! and I felt kinda bad about it. The game was really charming, and much of the time I really enjoyed it, but it had multiple elements that just made me grind my teeth or get bored. Part of it I wrote off as simply a matter of platformers. I've played a couple here and there over the last few years, with few of them feeling as good as Sonic Classics or New Super Mario on the DS. Was that world? Whatever. Anyway, I did the only sensible thing about uninstalling a platformer I got fed up with - I went through my list of pending card games and immediately installed another platformer.

Rogue Legacy is a delightfully inspired fusion of ARPG, roguelike (or the genre that fundamentally spawned ARPGs anyway) and platformer with beautiful properly retro graphics that settles on basically dying, and passing to your offspring a horrible quest to be maimed horribly in the hopes of eventually, one day, taking down that damn nasty castle. The game really reminds me of Act Raiser, actually, on the visual level. It's a little bit weird since it reminds me of both parts of Act Raiser at once but hey that's cool.

So given I've been frustrated and irritated with platformers since like, 2010 or something, you'd imagine I installed this game, played it for ten minutes then uninstalled after I brutally died three times in very short order, right?

Actually maybe it reminds me of Soulblazer. Maybe it reminds me of 16-bit era games in a general way. In a good way. But not of Super Castlevania, which I played back in 2011 and found did not age quite as well as I'd hoped. Can I go with 'it reminds me of Quintet? Does anyone ever remember who that is?

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.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Clickr

I actually played Clickr well past the point of getting my cards, but somehow it just sounds like a pun name suits a silly little game. Clickr was on my wishlist, on Steam, for a long time before a friend bought it for me for Christmas after I bought them a game a day for a week or something. Steam sales are good for buying but they're really good for gifting!

Clickr is a very simple to learn puzzle game that relies on little more than three button presses. First and foremost is 'the clickng' which allows you to remove most pieces from the playing board with a click of the mouse. Your goal in doing so is to produce four squares of the same color, which join up to become a clickable big square that generates points. The game also allows you to rotate the board, with gravity always obeying whatever down currently is. There is little more on the basic level than this, you can also get 'turn squares' which increase points, chain combos and some game modes have 'block' and 'star' pieces which behave slightly differently. There's a fair amount of depth in the core gameplay even if the basics are very, very simple.

Presentation wise Clickr appears to me to be rather, well, Asian in origin with very cute graphics and an adorable sound track filled with happy noises. Apparently the studio behind the game is from South Korea, which wasn't my first guess, but I won't post my first guess since it kinda shows how poor I am as a white canadian man at telling different cultures apart. I digress; the game is smooth looking, the interface is good and like I said it is filled to the brim with large amounts of cute. My only real complaint with the art style and presentation lies with the skin feature. The game allows you to reskin it to your pleasure, but there's only three skins, which it could have used more!

In terms of content there really isn't a "basic" Clickr game. You open with puzzle mode, which is actually far more cerebral than it appears at first blush. I didn't really notice until stage 21 (which, if you buy the game, you'll probably notice as well) as to what is going on. After that you get battle mode and push mode, which are sort of "vs" game modes against the AI. Battle mode requires paying attention to the other player far more than push mode, with rewards for timing your stars and minetraps against the AI's wave of forces. It's a good extension to the main game, and fun in its way. Lastly there's a puzzle mode that centres more around turning than clicking, which is referred to as IQ mode. IQ mode feels like a more nuanced shifting block puzzle.

Each of the main modes will have a handful of additional tweaked modes based on them, such as a battle mode where you don't get stars but get tons of stones to make mines with instead. Most of these game modes are slightly different, but don't really offer a big enough change up to really make you enjoy a mode you've grown tired of.

Regardless, if there is one complaint about Clickr it ties back to why I had the game on my wishlist in the first place. I don't really go in for puzzle or match games. I really liked Bejeweled 3, but I only played it for a week or two before getting tired of it. You know who does like Bejeweled 3 a ton? My mother. So I've been looking for other puzzle games to put on her computer, and Clickr unfortunately does not fit the bill. There really aren't many casual modes for this game and the relaxing content dries up after the first hour. Past that, it isn't a casual game, and after a while success required something like 2 clicks per second. I'm not really fretting, it was never for me and I did have fun with it, but it's not casual enough to gift to my mother.

There's nothing really wrong with clickr, other than being a bit too hard, but if you're looking for another match puzzle game to fiddle with, it's a well made title with some cutesie graphics and a silly sound track. The presentation is good and the game, while simple, is pretty good.