Stone me if you want, but - PvE???

    • In other PvE news, LotR: LCG is going in the right direction. There are some neat things coming. If anyone is interested, go read the 26 Mar weekly news update on Steam. While you're at it, check out the 19 Mar update as well about the new tutorial. They actually care about the new player experience. That game has progressively gotten more fun to co-op with a friend.

    • Hey Coyote just wanted to say thanks for starting this thread if you are still around. I am sure I have posted in here before but that doesn't matter now.

      To bad the game went to shit after explicitly focusing on PVP. I was here for the PVE side and backed only for that and know many others did as well.

      At least I gained 2 friends on steam from the ordeal other than that it has been a waste.

    • Callahan wrote:

      Hey Coyote just wanted to say thanks for starting this thread if you are still around. I am sure I have posted in here before but that doesn't matter now.

      To bad the game went to shit after explicitly focusing on PVP. I was here for the PVE side and backed only for that and know many others did as well.

      At least I gained 2 friends on steam from the ordeal other than that it has been a waste.
      Thanks a lot. Well - we tried. We had a lot of great ideas how to keep PvE alive with minimum effort (add new nodes to existing map with cards and encounters from new Pvp expansions, do something with lore more, listen to our feedback, monetize the pve...)
      I would 100% buy a rest of the Pve campaign a year ago if they decided to release it that way and get some money - but they lied and lied (we have a lot of dungeons and even raids ready was a last update from cory. yeah right...)
      and then stopped communicating

      what can you do more? :-/ I got really emotionally invested in hex, because MtG-like PvE MMO was my dream game. When hex was OK (if you count 2 years between PvE releases as OK), i played just it and nothing else.
      Now im sad again. I play MTG Arena now, but i miss the PvE there a lot.

    • Coyote wrote:

      We had a lot of great ideas how to keep PvE alive with minimum effort (add new nodes to existing map with cards and encounters from new Pvp expansions, do something with lore more, listen to our feedback, monetize the pve...)
      It's always been about a lack of engineering resources, not a lack of ideas or lore or card design. There is a lot of unreleased content1 deep in the game files. Enough to make me believe Cory when he said that this and that had been designed and fleshed out but he needed more time to get it released. The designer-to-engineer ratio was way too high though. So many ideas in the pipeline, so much lore, but not enough people to actually implement it and turn it into real software. There is no such thing as minimum effort when it comes to software. Everything takes time and effort.

      Cryptozoic is a board game company. To create board games, you need a lot of creative people, designers, artists, but very few, if any, engineers, because it's all cardboard pieces, and your players can use their mind to fill in the gaps. A software company needs engineers, lots of them, because every single detail needs to be implemented. You can't just print a rule book and let the players implement it to their understanding, you need to code every single thing. I think Hex stuck with the board game mentality and neglected engineering.

      1 : Among the things that's been designed but not released, about two dozen quest lines (there's an ambush, there's a heist, something with the Yeti family, King Ook-Bok, the Void Society, the Primal of Pain, many more, and my personal favorite: Squirrels vs. Dinosaurs), as well as 9 raids.

    • I think they realized that too late, or was just stubborn/not knowledgeable enough to adjust in time. Unless you have 20+ years of history and deep fanbase, one mistake is going to kill you. Killed Artifact; Killed Hex; killed a ton of card games. It takes time to build a Rome; it is also sturdy enough to not fall in a single day. Oh well, fuck this timeline.

      P.S. Remembered Hex today and decided to check the forum for funsies.

    • AceBladewing wrote:

      All I know is whoever releases a PVE focused card game of quality will get all my money. Unfortunately, Hex already took my money without giving me what they promised. Never again will I kickstart based on potential.

      I still don't get it, I figured "it's a TCG, not star citizen, they aren't promising the world, surely, they can deliver even if they are a small company..." and then... ugh.

      rabble rabble rabble!

    • I don't know what's going on with that site, but the graphs for 'employees' and 'revenue' are identical. Following similar trends, I could understand, but seriously. Go flip between the two of them. I don't think that site is reporting real data.
      Old username: Aradon | Collector backer | Starting a guild for Newbies -- "The Cerulean Acadamy" -- Taking applications once guilds are implemented

    • Fred wrote:

      It's always been about a lack of engineering resources, not a lack of ideas or lore or card design.

      No, it was specifically a lack of willingness to design a proper PvE game. If you play through the adventure zones using only the cards you can get from that, your deckbuilding options are boring craps. It's grindathons for weak, or incredibly niche cards that are only good if you have a whole deck built around the concept (which mostly involves PvP cards, because mechanics/synergies are PvP first and PvE never).

      If they had built a proper F2P MMO game, that is, one with interesting card collecting and deckbuilding as an entirely F2P player, things would have been very different. Instead, they made PvE a side-game for PvP. They made Siege a gold sink for the PvP players with massive gold hoards from their high-powered PvP decks. Really accessible to new players!

    • Ainulindale wrote:

      Fred wrote:

      It's always been about a lack of engineering resources, not a lack of ideas or lore or card design.
      No, it was specifically a lack of willingness to design a proper PvE game. If you play through the adventure zones using only the cards you can get from that, your deckbuilding options are boring craps. It's grindathons for weak, or incredibly niche cards that are only good if you have a whole deck built around the concept (which mostly involves PvP cards, because mechanics/synergies are PvP first and PvE never).

      If they had built a proper F2P MMO game, that is, one with interesting card collecting and deckbuilding as an entirely F2P player, things would have been very different. Instead, they made PvE a side-game for PvP. They made Siege a gold sink for the PvP players with massive gold hoards from their high-powered PvP decks. Really accessible to new players!

      This can't be repeated enough, also when this forum closes I want the thread at the top to be this one.

    • I agree that the business model for pve was extremely wrong and pve was just a side game. For the majority of the game's life pve was just grinding the frost ring arena.

      What came first the horrible business model or the inability to make good pve content that constantly changes is more difficult to determine.

    • Goliathus wrote:

      Maybe it's just me but I really enjoyed the AZ. Very fun without needing all the power cards and a fully-tuned deck just makes it boring.
      I liked the AZ too and spent alot of time with it. But the endgame came to be the frost ring arena probably because it took too much effort to make more dungeons (even though the "bucket" should have been completed).

      PVE also had a enormous amount of equipment options that I am not sure was necessary. Sure it was extremely customizable, but the effort and coding may have been better spent on content.

      When I go back to the kickstarter it seemed to be advertised as mainly as a mmo tcg. So I thought pve was the main focus of the game.

      Kickstarter people who wanted to "invest" with things like multiple pro tiers probably helped sway the game to focus on card value retention which I dont think helped the game either.

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Pandaemonium ().