{"id":669,"date":"2016-05-05T18:25:03","date_gmt":"2016-05-05T16:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/?p=669"},"modified":"2016-05-05T18:25:03","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T16:25:03","slug":"magic-duels-review-2-the-bugs-strike-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/magic-duels-review-2-the-bugs-strike-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic Duels: Review 2: The Bugs Strike Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, just about a year ago now, I wrote a completely scathing review<\/a> of the tumultuous mess that Magic Duels was at launch.<\/p>\n

Given the online nature of the game and given that it “perpetually renews” itself whenever new cards come out, I figured I would get back in and see a handful of things for myself.\u00a0 Notably:\u00a0 whether or not the game was more stable, whether or not the game fared better in my books if I had more cards [and a greater pool of potential deck lists to pull from] and whether or not Stainless had listened to the sheer avalanche of complaints about the game’s launch state.<\/p>\n

That last question?\u00a0 That’s the question that binds them all.<\/p>\n

The Good<\/h2>\n
\"Like<\/a>
Let’s try that again, shall we?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I want to start off with the good, because there are a handful of things that Stainless has done since I picked up the game that make it far, far better than it ever was at launch.\u00a0 But bear in mind, we’re talking about two or three small things.\u00a0 The ocean of bad that surrounds this game swallows all of these things up in an instant.<\/p>\n

Quests are far better.\u00a0 I can’t overstate this enough.\u00a0 At launch, there was potential for you to receive a kind of quest where the game saddled you with a particular deck and you had to go out and beat the AI or other opponents with that deck.\u00a0 These quests were AWFUL.\u00a0 Not only did you have very limited control over what happened as you added cards to your deck, but you never got the sense that the computer was offering you the most powerful cards from your pool to build with.\u00a0 The results were a dismal failure.\u00a0 You’d load up an opponent and die, repeatedly, while trying to complete your quest.<\/p>\n

Now?\u00a0 You get to make your deck every time.\u00a0 And the payouts are better.\u00a0 Odd as it seems, when I’m playing Magic:\u00a0 Duels, I feel like I’m getting better money-for-time than I am with Hearthstone.\u00a0 [indeed, Hearthstone’s payouts have remained mostly miserly in the two+ years that game has been running, even as more and more sets have been released.]<\/p>\n

The second big fix is stability.\u00a0 The servers are far less likely to buckle under the weight of players.\u00a0 Some of this I might ascribe to drop-off – the game at launch was certainly not what most people expected or wanted, so the player base that’s been left behind are the die-hards who – across six months [!] of not having a major fix, have stuck with the product they’ve been offered.<\/p>\n

The third and final good fix is matchmaking, which actually happens now.\u00a0 There are still problems, of course, because this is a game penned by Stainless, but we’re getting there, slowly but surely.\u00a0 Who knows?\u00a0 In ten years, this platform might work as intended!<\/p>\n

The single player story is FAR better.\u00a0 Stainless learned from their prior, rather lackluster story-based decks and missions.\u00a0 The story-telling is still abysmal, but the decks you pilot are far more interesting for the new Innistrad and Gatewatch campaigns.\u00a0 I especially want to call out the last two missions of the Gatewatch campaign as being superb.\u00a0 You get to play with tremendous power [including some cards you will never actually see in Duels – a cruel tease if ever there was one] and it leaves a far better impression than the awful, awful quest you embarked on in the original Origins game.<\/p>\n

The Bad<\/h2>\n
\"OK.<\/a>
The patch! It’s coming! And it will make everything OK! Promise!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Whoo boy.<\/p>\n

I’m not even sure of where to start.<\/p>\n

So, I mentioned that the game didn’t have any big fixes for almost six whole months.\u00a0 Well, what happened was that there was<\/em> going to be a pretty major patch that was<\/em> going to launch with Oath of the Gatewatch, but then Stainless – in their peerless and infinite wisdom – basically told the players “we’ll release these cards with the new set.\u00a0 We have a great, new patch coming with the set that will fix a lot of stuff!\u00a0 It’ll be great!\u00a0 You’ll see!”<\/p>\n

So for SIX MONTHS [!] [fixes to buying cards notwithstanding and server stability issues] the game cruised along, broken as ever.\u00a0 This meant that many of the issues I bought up in my original review still stand.\u00a0 You still can’t talk to people on your friends list in the game.\u00a0 Matchmaking with friends is still an incoherent mess.\u00a0 The game just randomly crashes, because…reasons.<\/p>\n

On 6 April, 2016, a new, large patch arrived which dropped new cards into the game and fixed some persistent problems players were having.\u00a0 But this – as I keep re-iterating – is Stainless Games.\u00a0 And it wouldn’t be a major patch without major broken-ness.<\/p>\n

So, the good news – again – because there’s so little to write about here:\u00a0 an opponent conceding now leads to an actual end-game where you can just take your rank and money and run.\u00a0 If you DESPERATELY want to, you can still beat up the AI.\u00a0 [but this, of course, in true Stainless fashion only works in very particular situations.]<\/p>\n

Two-Headed Giant FINALLY gets coin rewards for winning.\u00a0 [but again, this being Stainless, this only happens in very particular situations.]<\/p>\n

And then, of course, my favourite-favourite:\u00a0 deck selection defaulting to the last-played deck.\u00a0 Thank God for that.<\/p>\n

There are some other, small quality-of-life changes, but most of these are small enough to not really bother with talking about.\u00a0 And that’s it.\u00a0 Six months later.\u00a0 That’s all she wrote.<\/p>\n

The bad is…getting worse, somehow.\u00a0 Stainless figured it’d be a good time to change the way priority worked in the game – as if it weren’t murky enough already.\u00a0 In Magic, you see, once you cast a spell, you have what is known as priority.\u00a0 Once the spell is cast, there’s a little window where people can react to that spell being cast by – say – deciding they don’t like that spell and wanting to stop it.\u00a0 This is known as “passing priority.”\u00a0 The game – the paper game, at least – handles this in a very graceful way, with opponents passing priority until they don’t want to do anything anymore.\u00a0 At this point, the game sees all the spells and resolves them – last in, first out.<\/p>\n

In Magic Duels, priority was never really the game’s strong suit.\u00a0 They wanted it to be a beginner friendly experience [which is terrible for everyone, by the by] so they streamlined.\u00a0 In the new patch, they streamlined SO MUCH that they completely broke the flow of the game, rendering it unplayable for some given particular deck-builds.<\/p>\n

They also – with Wizards\/Hasboro’s consent – lopped cards right out of your collection, because these cards were deemed “too powerful.”\u00a0 There was NO in-game warning about this.\u00a0 If you were glued to sites covering the game, you would be aware that a quite powerful artifact that was used in nearly every deck was suddenly – and irrevocably – replaced with a very vanilla dude that adds absolutely nothing of strategic importance to the game.<\/p>\n

Stability has – somehow – been poorly optimized for this particular patch.\u00a0 Get too much on screen and suddenly, the game starts stuttering.<\/p>\n

One of my other favourite “bugs” [although, I imagine this isn’t so much a bug as a “quiet nudge” to make you buy cards] is that there are new quests in the game that feature the new mechanics.\u00a0 If you own none of those cards, you can’t do those quests.\u00a0 But you also can’t complete them in the story-mode that happens to have a smattering of those cards, too.<\/p>\n

So.\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 Stainless being Stainless.<\/p>\n

I logged another fifty or so hours for this review and I think I am rather content to say that Stainless hasn’t learned a thing.\u00a0 My initial impression of the game still stands.\u00a0 If you’re looking for a reasonable implementation of a Magic game that’s free-ish to play, RUN AWAY LIKE THE DEVIL.\u00a0 This is not that game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, just about a year ago now, I wrote a completely scathing review of the tumultuous mess that Magic Duels was at launch. Given the online nature of the game and given that it “perpetually renews” itself whenever new cards come out, I figured I would get back in and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[37,225,224,69,67,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669"}],"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=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":674,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions\/674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greywolfe.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}