Master Duel” is currently the most popular card game on Steam, usually online peak of about 30,000 up and down, this data is enough to form a rift between it and other card games; not long ago in the TGA won the “best mobile game” of “Marvel Snap” also has PC End, the number of people online is almost seven or eight thousand, and just announced that it will stop updating in 2023 “Quintessential”, the peak value of nearly three years on Steam is only seven thousand, now is even two thousand is difficult to reach.
Especially these works are free to play and for the world, while the “game immortal card” and the price of 32 yuan “threshold”, the majority of domestic players.
In the end, this online deck-building game is a rather niche genre, and it is for this reason that the upcoming discontinuation of the “Hearthstone Legend” national service is considered a “whale of a drop” – in this more than 10 million players, even if only a few switch to other games. It will also become a considerable fresh blood, but also to the current state of the environment of these games will cause impact.
This is also the opportunity that “Game of Immortals” is experiencing.
1.In fact, many of the current players of “Game of Thrones” are “Hearthstone refugees”, after all, the gameplay of “8 players on the same stage, live group of cards to fight each other” can be used as a more or less “tavern wargame The “8 players on the same table, the live group of cards to fight each other” game can be more or less as “pub wargame” alternative.
Just like most self-propelled chess games, “Game of Immortals” also involves players drawing a certain number of cards each round, from which they can select the deck to be sent to the field, and the redundant hands can be replaced with new cards or add “cultivation” – ” Cultivation” is a character attribute that affects the player’s character’s life value and hand order, and also determines the depth of the player’s current drawable pool.
However, the core gameplay of “Game of Thrones” is actually closer to the PVP version of “The Killing Tower” than “self-propelled chess”.
Players can choose their “faction” and “character” before the game starts, and the three factions have their own fixed card pools, while each character has their own talents. In other words, before the game starts, players can already determine the general direction of the game’s construction.
In the course of the game, each round, the players fight against each other, is based on the order of successive hands automatically play a card, the deck in order to cycle, until the blood of one side is deducted to below zero. This is a reference to the basic design of “tower-climbing” DBG games, where players have to make their decks form an effective cycle as much as possible to accumulate advantages; at the same time, it subverts the original turn system where one side runs out of cards and then the other side takes its turn to play, making up for the gap caused by successive hands and giving the game more characteristics of its own.
Most of the players who have contacted with the early “self-propelled chess” still have the impression that one of the characteristics of the game at that time is that players only need to concentrate on putting together a strong lineup, and they can only leave it to fate for the situation of pawn chaos after the game starts, and the variables brought by randomness are also very common, so there is actually not much need to calculate.
The opposite can be said about the “Game of Immortals”: each round of combat is strictly in accordance with the “card order” to carry out, the theoretical “maximum output” is completely controllable, so compared to picking a deck of cards, “optimize the card order The most brain-intensive part of the game is “optimizing the card sequence” compared to picking the cards.
Like “Killing Spire”, “Game of Immortals” is also a typical “small value” card, whether it is attack or defense, most of the values attached to the card surface are only single digits, and the operations involved are not beyond addition and subtraction, even if the game proceeds to the late stage, it will not be full of screen popping astronomical numbers.
However, the hundreds of cards in the game have been mixed with quite complex mechanisms and routines, in the limited turn time, players most of the time too late to calculate the optimal solution will have to rush to the field, and the most common trick taught to newcomers by veteran players who participated in the game testing phase is to always have draft paper and calculators on hand.
In the postings of “The Game of Immortals”, you can often see this mantra of an elementary school math teacher
In a way, the gameplay of “Game of Immortals” is very similar to itself – when the demo of the game first came out, some players lamented that such a simple idea as “tower climbing + self-propelled chess” had never been played until now. But the controversies that the game has experienced so far prove that such an “addition” is not as simple as it seems.
2.Compared to the highly acclaimed test phase, the “game of immortal cards” officially on the shelves of the wind is far less than expected, the current positive feedback rate on Steam is still at about 77%.
This is mainly due to the game both set a “buyout” threshold of 32 yuan, the game but also contains internal purchases, players can pay directly to unlock the role, was evaluated as “ugly”.
Many players in the in-depth experience of the game for the production team to cry foul: the game through a variety of ways to give players a lot of currency, used to unlock the role more than enough, and like this as the game progresses gradually unlock new characters is also considered a “tower climbing” game to retain the link, mainly to avoid players to come up in the face of a large number of card pool overwhelmed, as for Set up internal purchase, obviously more for the “skin” “card back” and other decorative content to do pavement ……
But for those who are used to playing for free and suffering from the inclusions of card packs, the consumption model of “Game of Thrones” has become the “original sin”.
This is probably the first barrier to making “tower climbing” an online PVP game – for developers, it’s almost astronomical for a niche title like this to have more than 8,000 people online after launch, and more often than not, the game is released into obscurity. If directly as a free game on the shelves, the end is likely to be a bloodbath; and for an online game, if only 32 yuan can completely buy out the game content, the subsequent operation and the same may not be able to make ends meet, how much need to stay through the “internal purchase” to leave a way out.
Such a dilemma is not uncommon in the industry. Not long ago, another buyout domestic card game “Full Moon Night” released an announcement, saying that the game has been in decline for five years of operation, relying on DLC to create subsequent revenue model is difficult to maintain the development costs, so the original DLC price from 6 yuan to 12 yuan.
Mojiri Studio, the company that made “Yixian”, has released two games on Steam before, both of which received good reviews, but the sales were pathetic just by looking at the number of reviews, so it’s easy to understand why they finally decided to release “Yixian” in the form of a buyout system, instead of using the “free mode” to fight for players. The number of players.
Endless Winter was the first game released by Ink Sun Studios
With the addition of some art staff, Ink Sun Studio now has 12 members, which is certainly a good size compared to Mega Crit, which had only two full-time staff members when it made Slay the Spire, but it’s still too small to run a multiplayer game.
In the first few days of service, the number of people online was clearly beyond the studio’s expectations, and the server crashed several times, with the game’s producer working as a customer service post at 2 a.m. to comfort players, and according to the official Discord channel, the producer eventually drove to the home of a member of Ops and asked him to climb out of bed to fix the server.
Although the card game can be considered as “explosive”, but in the face of the number of players exceeded expectations, the current “game immortal card” seems to be a bit “wretched”.
In the internal test phase is still a “hundred flowers” of the set environment, in the game officially on the shelves, in the anchor and player raid, driven by the relatively strong set soon swept the ladder, the environment iteration speed far beyond expectations, forcing the production team to work overtime to balance adjustments.
The simple card drawing, which was evaluated by players as “quite personal” in the internal test, is now criticized as “scribble and perfunctory”, and the art staff needs to follow up a lot more content ……
But most players still recognize this style of illustration
But this at least means that the gameplay has been recognized, has a stable player base, and has the basis to continue to move forward.
3.Compared with the novelty of the gameplay, most of the domestic players naturally accept the theme setting of “Game of Immortals” based on “immortality cultivation”.
Whether it is “breakthrough realm” or “fighting”, these concepts are unexpectedly suitable for the “card eating chicken” style of play, playing the ladder to ascend the stage has really become The “sabbatical”, it is easy for people to generate a sense of immersion; and “sword clan”, “five elements”, “formation” “trigram” these metaphysical elements can be naturally integrated into the design of various cards, forming some complementary effects – players a look at the name of the card to understand the effect of its role, or read the card description, more or less to understand the original card surface The player can read the card’s description and more or less understand the terminology on the card.
The element of “immortality cultivation” is integrated into every corner of the game
For example, the “star position” in the game is borrowed from the terminology of Go, and cards placed in specific positions can receive bonuses, while the expressions “star position” and “Tian Yuan” in Go originally come from romanticized imagination. In the Chinese context, it is easy to associate these terms with effects.
The portrait on the card face is also taken from Go
But for some overseas players, that’s a different story altogether.
Conclusion
In addition to new features such as balance adjustments, adding new cards to the card pool, and adding full character trials, the game also added a complete standalone mode called “Secret World”, which inherits the more traditional “Tower Climbing” gameplay and gives players a chance to put together a more powerful deck than the PVP mode more powerful deck, to challenge the boss.
At first, people thought it was just a teaching mode to “give rewards for nothing”, but after trying it, they found out that the difficulty of these puzzles is quite demanding, involving the deduction of various mechanisms, the existence of only one solution, and the eight cards are difficult to violently crack by exhaustive enumeration (not to mention that sometimes they have to leave blank). “A cup of tea and a cigarette, a calendar to solve a day” is the norm.
As many players have lamented, the content contained in the “game of immortal cards” is undoubtedly “value for money” compared to the price, if not at the beginning of the posture of “class gold game”, most likely to harvest higher evaluation.
Gamera Games is responsible for the distribution of “Game of Immortality”. For this domestic publisher, it is a brand new attempt to participate in the long term operation of a multiplayer game, but Gamera has also published popular domestic games such as “Dyson Ball Project” and “The Amazing Immortal Simulator”, which have performed well in terms of subsequent content updates. These works have performed well in terms of subsequent content updates, and these experiences can undoubtedly play a lot of roles in supporting the growth of “Yixian Brand” into a more complete game.
