I have to be honest and blunt. I cared about PvE and Lore a lot (Stone me if you can...?)

- PvE was great potential, amazing idea and was great and abysmal at the same time. So huge potential insanely wasted. Bad design decisions. All great stories were tied to PvP with boring PvE areas. Everyone was like "this will be shandalar 2.0" and we ended in arena where we could not use our mercenaries and few repetitive pve nodes.
- PvE was abandoned and it was the best thing that made hex unique, there was a period of severe toxicity towards lore/pve players ("freeloaders that dont pay, so pvp is the way to go") and Hex was surfing on that wave
- PvE was full of broken promises - no cooperative MP, static dead and repetitive word, no guilds, classes not finished even as game was "released" and coming to steam. MMO TCG my ass
- we grow worried when there were no payments to winners and artists and we are banned, threads deleted and last piece of statement from hex was - our financial situation is not your business, so fuck off. That was basically the last piece of communication before sliding to torpor. All the collections lost value, all the important tools shut down, everyone left and these posts will be read by the last 10 people that come every Friday to shit on the update posts. So thats that

i could continue, but im too bitter with them not being honest, not communicating and everything i wanted to say is in this thread: forums.hextcg.com/index.php?th…e-me-if-you-want-but-pve/
and it is still valid - because there was no pve changes since i created that thread

Im sorry cory had his dark moment, i dont know anything about it, he seems like a nice guy. But fuck him and fuck me if i trust that snakeoil salesman again.
You seem like nice guy. PvE was great potential wasted and kickstarter promises broken. Go ask people with guildmaster pledge...
Have a nice day! Dreamwalker out.

There are some things that I would like to add.

1) Depression is a serious topic. I do not know the extent that Cory has suffered, or whether any clinical diagnosis can be ascribed to it, but I sympathize. The faltering of Hex's profitability, activity, and reputation over the last few years must have been incredibly distressing on its own. Couple that with any predisposition for being depressed, and the resulting darkness must have been a struggle to endure, with or without therapy. Things could have turned out much worse. I am glad to hear that recovery is ongoing and that there has even been hope for progress of Hex behind the scenes, but the journey is far from over, and it might never end. I hope that Cory is and remains in a good place mentally.

If anybody reading this is depressed, please get help. Depression is a medical condition, and it can be managed through various forms of treatment. It is not a disease, it is not a sign of weakness, and it is not something that you "deserve" to manage on your own.

Ok, with that out of the way,

2) I also fall upon the autistic spectrum. As such, I have a tendency to obsess about things. In fact, the primary reason why I never became active on these forums while I was active in Hex was precisely because I knew that it would become too consuming for me to actually enjoy. There are so many discussions that I would have wanted to join in on, so many suggestions for changes/improvements that I would have wanted to request and defend the validity of, so many other things that I would have wanted to argue against, and so many people I would have wanted to thank for making Hex awesome. (In defense of my decision to not be active on the forum due to my obsessive nature; this makes my second long-winded post in two days that I spent a long time typing up and reviewing before posting.)

3) On the topic of Hex2 and PvE stuff, here are some suggestions that I have.

* Keep the lore. As Ozawa mentioned, the Hex lore was awesome. That was an incredible world, and I would love to see it revisited. All of that backstory, worldbuilding, artwork, and character creation has been done already, so it would be much easier to refresh the plot instead of throwing everything out. I expect that this will be done anyway; it wouldn't be Hex anymore otherwise.

* Keep the gameplay, if possible. Again, so much work has already been done with the game mechanics, turn/phase structure, and card and champion design and balancing. Hex's "more forgiving than MtG" threshold-based resource system - along with all the "only realistically possible in an online TcG" stuff - was what drew me to the game in the first place. Even if everything has to be re-coded from scratch (unfortunately, from what I have heard, the original Hex was build on a complete mess, so it might be best to throw it away now that the programmers know what they're doing), having those concepts at the ready will save a lot of development time. On the other hand, maybe something completely different would make it easier to implement cooperative play in an actual MMO-RPG-TCG environment; if so, go for it!

* Either go all-in on PvE or have a clear divide between PvE and PvP. I don't have access to any data to back this up, so I could be entirely wrong, but I don't think most people actually enjoyed the intermingling of PvE content and PvP content. Being able to use cards from PvP packs in PvE was fine, as was picking up staple PvP commons/uncommons in PvE; however, other than that, I think locking so many cards and equipment behind the chests obtained from packs caused complaints rather than positive intermingling between the PvE and PvP communities.

* Do away with those spinnable chests entirely, or at least drastically revamp them. The whole topic of "lootboxes" and "gambling" has become a problem in recent years, so it would be safe to stay clear of those issues. At the very least, it would be nice to have some kind of crafting system to be able to get something you don't already have after sacrificing X duplicates of other things. (There was another CcG I once played where, in addition to being able to trade in 20 cards for a random one of higher rarity, packs were weighted to prioritize giving you a rare card you don't have if you don't have 1 of each, and then to give you one that you don't have a playset of if you don't have a playset of each. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, that structure has flaws in a TcG, but something similar could be applied to PvE packs or dungeon loot tables of "old" zones while the newest one at any time is fully random. The value of old stuff tends to drop when new stuff becomes available anyway, so this would just normalize the value of old stuff by rarity.)

* Don't make promises. I think that "broken promises" and "unfulfilled promises" on PvE were some of the major failures of Hex. I understand that Kickstarter hype drove a lot of those ideas as things that the developers always wanted to include, until the realities of game design got in the way. For Hex2, let the game stand on its own, and don't release it until it is able to stand on its own. Then, anything extra can be revealed only when it is near completion. Let people be excited with the game they have, not merely tolerate the game they have until it becomes the game they want!

* Don't release a broken/incomplete/frustrating game. To get good reviews on other platforms, the game really has to be complete, stable, intuitive, and smooth at the time of release. Loyal fans who are willing to deal with pervasive issues are not enough to keep the ratings high. A TcG should have trading; if trading isn't easily possible, then something is wrong. Likewise, if there is a way to buy/sell single cards and equipment, it shouldn't be a chore to use it. (One alternative to the auction house could be to sell to some NPC directly. The price it pays you decreases the more copies of the card it is holding, while it also sells those cards for a 10% profit or something, acting as a gold/platinum sink.) Tutorials should be obvious, intuitive, and updated to be valid as new mechanics are added. Also, tutorials should cover both actual gameplay and using the game interface.

PVE was the entire selling point, the co-op/ 3 player part was what sold the game from being a co-op. PVE was abandon because they failed to monetize it. Even though key rare cards actually sold for quite a bit and generate "money" out of thin air with the rarer cards. (A lot of issue was the rare cards didn't really see much play outside of the theme decks they where made for, and required equipment to become anywhere close to playable.) Then a lot of the uncommon's where essentially power houses from I remember. Adaptatron is literally a solution to any unique threat that might show up.

PVE was abandoned pretty much to sate the PVP Jeff Hoogland crowd who said well I don't like it so I don't care if backers get the middle finger, I want you to FUND what I WANT. The card value people kinda ruined the game too, I'm sorry but you can't compete with HS/MTGA and now so many other steam card games that don't force to purchase the game. I play real life TCG's but they dont work digitally, a digital good isn't permanent, you don't own it and could pretty much disappear at any time.

Funnily enough thinking about it a lot of the PVE cards where when cards could just abuse power level since players didn't have to deal with them... and to be honest... outside of a few PVE cards like Acorn allowing to thin your deck, the red card that lets you play cards for free from the top x cards of your deck; but a lot of them fully equipped where on par on non-equipped rares in PVP.

Another big thing about PVE that was kinda a failure is none of the decks didn't have aggro safe checks, and was usually better to play a hybrid of aggro/evasion decks before the encounter effect goes off or goes silly. (The last boss of AZ1 is a key contender of this with his Gem Power cards) and the puzzle fights where kinda meh since a lot of them where more based off having PVP decks.

If they make HEX 2 in the future, I think they should take and focus on the co-op and mmorpg focus on it. I'm not expecting a 3d world, but heck sometime 2d with the old timey 3d dungeon exploring could be interesting, with buddies could be cool. Thinking something like MTG: Shand but an mmorpg, and have the world developed so if you move in a party area encounters would be set for how many players. Have set area have a mob pool (with their own loot per mob) and so 1 person wandering around has to do 1 vs 1's a group of 3 wander around and deal with 3 random mobs. I think it would be a good feature as early areas could have no deck synergy together, then harder areas might have you deal with voidcorrupted spider people, so you have one side filling someones deck with spiders and one stealing and milling cards.

I always imagined Hex's environment design to be 2D, and closer to point and click adventure layouts, until I saw their weird 3D overworld map stuff. I was expecting those city panoramas to be the bulk of the world, with clickable points to interact with NPCs or start encounters. I can kind of see why they went the route they did, but still think that aesthetically speaking, everything would be more cohesive in a 2D environment.