{"id":454,"date":"2015-08-10T17:52:06","date_gmt":"2015-08-10T15:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/?p=454"},"modified":"2015-08-10T17:52:06","modified_gmt":"2015-08-10T15:52:06","slug":"magic-duels-origins-review-i-see-the-bad-moon-arising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/magic-duels-origins-review-i-see-the-bad-moon-arising\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic Duels: Origins Review: I See The Bad Moon Arising"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Warning! Long! Ranty! Nitpicky! There\u2019s so much wrong here that I need to go past my usual 1000 word limit! Sorry in advance for those who like shorter reviews.]<\/p>\n

\"Many<\/a>
Fatal Error, you say? Like this game, perhaps?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Someone at Wizards of the Coast must have been reading my blog, because a handful of weeks after I opined that Hearthstone made me want a new online Magic experience<\/a>, they went right ahead and dropped a very weird bomb: The yearly Duels of the Planeswalkers games? They were going away.\u00a0\u00a0 Now, that \u201cfranchise\u201d was going to become the baseline for a bigger product [much as it should have been to begin with] that would allow Wizards to cater to the new Magic player by introducing sets of cards as they were released on paper to a digital client that was a little more friendly and not Magic: Online.<\/p>\n

This puts Duels in a weird space \u2013 and this, really \u2013 is the crux of this review. \u201cDuels is in a weird space,\u201d because it can\u2019t take paper players away from that game and it can\u2019t usurp the legion of more-or-less pro players that only use Magic: Online. So it has to be just different enough to appeal to the new players and just friendly enough to help them, but it can\u2019t cannibalize any of those other players because of it\u2019s payment model, because, you see, Wizards saw Hearthstone, saw that it was making a bunch of money and figured \u201cthat\u2019s a great idea!\u201d<\/p>\n

And that, friends, is how you end up with a product that\u2019s pushed out the door in a terrible state to players that really want it to work out, but who are going to quit, because \u2013 as it so often seems with Wizards \u2013 they don\u2019t want to pay for quality.<\/p>\n

Stainless Games has a reputation, now, amongst Magic players as \u201ca bunch of people who just don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing\u201d and their latest exploits with this new game just prove that to a T.<\/p>\n

Launch was weird: they gave the game to iOS first. [we later figured out this was a kind of beta with a small pool of potential testers] No one actually knew when launch was going to be. We got to near-launch-day before this date was revealed [for Steam, it turned out that it was 29 July, 2015 \u2013 and then, it showed up pretty late in the day on that service.] Once launch happened, the servers fell over. Sure, some of this can be attributed to the massive number of people downloading and playing the game, but I think this has more to do with Stainless, themselves. Then it turned out that one of the server outages was to fix an exploit. [You could, at one point, buy \u201ccoins\u201d without paying for them.] No communication. We were just told that \u201cthe servers are down,\u201d and \u201cwe\u2019re sorry.\u201d [and again, this only transpired some way into the downtime.]<\/p>\n

\"You<\/a>
Not an uncommon sight in the world of Magic Duels Origins<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But even just getting past the launch issues [and some of them are still there, in fact, the server see-saws daily, finding games against human opponents seldom works, it\u2019s…not a very good experience] there are other problems with this iteration of the Duels franchise.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re 500 words into this review and I haven\u2019t even told you what Magic is \u2013 that\u2019s how terrible this situation is. So, Magic is a duel between two Wizards. They use their armies and spells to annihilate the other party. Each wizard \u2013 known in the series as a \u201cPlaneswalker\u201d starts with twenty life and [for most formats] a sixty card deck. Decks can consist of magical creatures, spells, artifacts [this is a gross oversimplification] and \u2013 crucially lands. Lands power your magic. Magic comes in five flavours: blue, red, green, white and black. Each flavour has it\u2019s own personality. Blue is thinky and slow, red is temperamental and fast. Black only cares for itself and uses the graveyard as a resource and so on.<\/p>\n

Magic is complex. Where a game of Hearthstone is all about getting creatures down and retaining control of the board, Magic can be far more subtle. Even if your opponent has a board full of guys, you can sometimes trick him and win.<\/p>\n

This complexity is great; it\u2019s what makes Magic so tactical. But if the online experience is badly built, all that\u2019s going to happen is that you\u2019re going to be frustrated. And, unfortunately, that\u2019s exactly what we have here.<\/p>\n

Getting cards is a grind because the game offers daily quests that are just plain frustrating. Get a quest to build a deck that\u2019s an \u201carchetype?\u201d Great. That means you need to use the deck wizard [a wizard that suggests cards to include in your deck] to build a monstrosity that you somehow have to pilot to game winning situations. Want to go into versus battles to complete your quests? Good luck getting an opponent. And even when you get an opponent, if you are winning the game and they concede, you…now have to beat the AI.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s say you do decide to build your own deck, well, good luck. The game comes with a handful of filters [that are about as baseline as it gets] that allow you to do the job. There\u2019s no card\/ability keyword search. There\u2019s no filter that lets you see only cards from a given set. While you can see the number of cards in a colour that you\u2019ve added to your deck, there\u2019s no good visual way to see what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

Oh, and while we\u2019re talking about that, let\u2019s talk about the restrictions Duels players face when building a deck. Wizards has said that Duels players won\u2019t get \u201call of a set.\u201d This means that if there\u2019s 100 cards in a set, Duels players might only see eighty of those. Then, on top of that, there are rarity restrictions: The game will literally only let you own one copy of a mythic rarity card and you can only put that one copy [but you\u2019re allowed multiple mythics with different names, of course] into your decks. So, it\u2019s not even remotely like paper Magic at all [It\u2019s been a long time since Standard \u2013 the format most people play \u2013 has had a banned or restricted list. Usually, you can just walk in playing a deck with four copies of whatever your heart desires.] \u2013 it\u2019s just terrible.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>
An actual duel!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let\u2019s pretend you take that deck you built into a solo duel: If you\u2019re playing for free, you can almost guarantee that anything other than stompy [a fast deck with cheap creatures that overwhelms the opponent before they can do anything] will probably result in a loss, because the computer just has better card selection and reasonable decks. [in one game, the computer put out two [!] planeswalkers \u2013 of different colours [!] and I imagine it had more than one copy [!]]<\/p>\n

And if you happen<\/em> to be grinding, good luck again: there\u2019s a cap of 400 coins per day that you can earn. [Stainless has gone on record that \u201ca day\u201d starts at 12:00am. But the community has figured out that this is not the case. \u201cA day\u201d \u2013 right now, anyway \u2013 starts whenever you originally started the client for the first time [or whenever you let your daily lapse and pick up the game again, I think.] \u2013 so if you started playing at 03:45 on the 30th of July, which was a Thursday, then your next quest will be given to you at 3:45 on July the 31st. This cap, by the by, was something that Wizards promised \u2013 right up until launch \u2013 wasn\u2019t going to be in the game at all.<\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s say you take that same deck to the online portion of the game, good luck again! Stainless doesn\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing and multiplayer is basically a grief-fest. People hang onto the timer for as long as they can. They concede just as everyone\u2019s drawing cards to force the client to crash. They quit in frustration [allowing them to move onto a new game] so that they can force you into playing out your game against the AI if you want to rank up. [I\u2019m serious. If a human player leaves in a one on one fight, the AI takes over. If you bail before the end of that fight, YOU LOSE RANK. How terrible is that? In paper Magic, if a player concedes, that\u2019s the end of the duel. A win for you, a loss for them and everyone goes away happy.]<\/p>\n

But wait! You\u2019ve heard two headed giant is back! That\u2019s awesome, right! Wrong. Stainless has somehow messed this up, too. That bad code that made you not find opponents in one-versus-one? It\u2019s here, too, but worse! Now, you might<\/em> get paired up with your buddy, [if you went in with a buddy, of course] but you\u2019re probably more likely to be opposing your buddy. And should you somehow get matched together [a Christmas miracle!] you can\u2019t communicate within the client AT ALL. You have to know the other person\u2019s steam account and use the Steam overlay to talk to them. Which, of course, obscures the game window entirely.<\/p>\n

Two Headed Giant is a great format where you and a friend are \u201cA giant\u201d and share a life total. When it\u2019s \u201cyour turn\u201d then you play cards together, as one on your side of the board, declaring attackers and blockers and so on. It\u2019s a fantastic format, because \u2013 say \u2013 between the pair of you, you might be running all out aggro and he might be running good control and that way, you can keep the tempo of the game flowing while denying your opponent their most crucial plays.<\/p>\n

But because two headed giant is a \u201cCasual\u201d format and not [really] endorsed by Wizards of the Coast, Stainless has decided that players who participate in these duels…don\u2019t earn currency. That\u2019s right. A game of Magic that often takes longer, often has more intricate plays and that often requires dedicated deck-building has NO PRIZE SUPPORT in this particular duels client, making it fundamentally pointless. Players need to either: choose to earn currency or play for nothing\/fun. And you know players, right? If they\u2019re there for a couple of hours and it\u2019s a choice between gaining currency or playing for fun, they\u2019re going to play for currency because it gets them ahead.<\/p>\n

\"For<\/a>
Where’d the playmat go?!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I haven\u2019t even mentioned how buggy Duels is, yet and we\u2019re almost at two thousand words. Some people can\u2019t even start the game. Or if they start it, it results in a black screen of nothingness. Or if they get a little further than that, still, they might end up with visual stew.<\/p>\n

The server crashing results in other bugs: people can\u2019t get started with the game because the server crashed at exactly the wrong time, leaving them without crucial starter cards. Stainless\u2019 response? Non-Americans [and Americans, too] need to call a support line IN AMERICA. They can e-mail, too, maybe. But good luck getting e-mail support.]<\/p>\n

And should you actually \u2013 after all this \u2013 be interested in the game, be VERY wary. The platform you start playing on is the platform you\u2019re essentially locked to. Did you get the Xbox One version of the game, but you\u2019re not crazy about how it works with a controller, [I haven\u2019t even mentioned that \u2013 I hated the way the controller worked with the PC version] well, if you pick the game up on Steam, you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN because there\u2019s no cross-platform support built into the game at all. It\u2019s ludicrous. Oh. And lest I forget, there\u2019s no Android release in sight [ever, possibly] and it only runs on the very<\/em> latest iOS devices. Let\u2019s not forget that the PS4 version isn\u2019t even out yet.<\/p>\n

If you do get into it, be aware that you\u2019re going to be trapped in a tutorial mission [I dunno if they\u2019ve done away with this yet] that explains EVERYTHING about the game. The plus side? You get coins for doing all of this. The minus side? If you\u2019re intimately familiar with Magic, you lose two hours of your life you\u2019re never getting back.<\/p>\n

\"In<\/a>
Oh, Chandra, I’d love to burn all the things, but my deck is terrible.<\/figcaption><\/figure>Speaking of those solo story missions: if the idea here was to show the rise of these Planeswalkers \u2013 to show how they became more powerful over time then Stainless has a lot<\/em> of work to do on those missions.<\/p>\n

The way these story missions play out: you start off as a weakling with a weak deck and \u2013 as you progress through the story, the opponents get more difficult and your deck gets upgraded, but it\u2019s still, basically, a weak deck. There\u2019s no sense of growing power at all. Just more spells that mean nothing added to your pile that you somehow have to pilot to victory.<\/p>\n

The black Planeswalker gets cards that come into play tapped. The blue planeswalker gets cards that \u2013 when targeted \u2013 just plain die. The red planeswalker gets miniscule guys that have to deal with huge threats, somehow. You get the point. I lost four or five hours of my life in the black campaign, just because I kept drawing dross and could not stem the tide of the AI\u2019s superior decks.<\/p>\n

Imagine a novice player playing those matches? Imagine being beat up over and over and over again and not realizing that it isn\u2019t you, it\u2019s the card choices that were made for you? What would you do? You\u2019d put the game down and never return. Wizards doesn\u2019t need that.<\/p>\n

Can I say anything good about this game? I can say some snarky things: The menu system is awesome! [Actually, it really isn\u2019t bad at all] \u2013 the art for the little interstitials is great! [But the reward animations that play whenever you successfully beat a campaign are laughably bad.] And that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n

When I said in my Hearthstone review that I wanted a decent Magic client, what I meant was that I wanted a GOOD Magic client that wasn\u2019t Magic: Online [which has it\u2019s own particular set of frustrations] that would be able to contend with Hearthstone. This isn\u2019t that game. If you\u2019re curious, my best advice would be to treat this as a \/very\/ long term beta. Just know that you\u2019ll be grinding your teeth all the way through \u2013 and what you might end up with \u2013 after the \u201cbeta\u201d phase is over will probably not even touch the greatness of the Microprose game from 1997.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s sad, really. Wizards could have tied this market up completely, but instead, they just don\u2019t seem to care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Warning! Long! Ranty! Nitpicky! There\u2019s so much wrong here that I need to go past my usual 1000 word limit! Sorry in advance for those who like shorter reviews.] Someone at Wizards of the Coast must have been reading my blog, because a handful of weeks after I opined that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[37,70,69,67,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}