I did a fairly long interview for a podcast. You can listen to it here: http://www.hamishakia.co.il/?p=4294
Its interesting to hear accents of people from other countries. Ya really get a feal of how other people say things. lol im not making fun of you jon. Its amazing Blue Manchu has members all over the world for such a small "Studio" Edit: you mentioned 5 copies of everything in the game which makes me think your limited to 5 copies of a "type" per deck is that true? Edit2: Jon plays world of tanks! You should play with me!
"Legendary playtesters." Ah, awesome. Does this mean that we know know "what Richard Garfield helped fix" without having to see Australia's PC Power Play magazine, or is there more to the story? Also, that section right there was the one that most interested me. The idea of battles lasting about 20 minutes as a target, with hour-long sessions being too long relative to the time you'd want to spend on deck-building. I'd like to know more about that: Is the idea to do 20 minutes per individual battle within a larger module/adventure? Or, somehow, an entire adventure in 20 minutes? I presume it's the former, but . . . If 20 minutes per individual battle is the target to allow deck-building time, can you adjust your decks between battles? And on a more general topic, what is the thinking about this play/deck-building ratio anyway? Is it that a player would be too tired after an hour of play? Is it that people enjoy themselves more if they can see the results of deck changes quickly? Is it that . . . people actually spend 23 hours and 40 minutes working on their deck at the professional level of CCG play, and this is the limiting factor?
I'm not sure what I was referring to. There's no 5 copy limit on anything in the game that I can think of. I'm on WoT as "manbot". Haven't been able to play much lately as the client started blue-screening my PC. My PC died last week, so maybe it will work better once I get the replacement.
We'll be talking about this issue in the dev diary over the coming weeks. The idea is to get the play time of each battle down. An adventure is a linked series of battles, so you wouldn't get through a whole adventure in 20 minutes, no. The point is really to minimize the level of time commitment involved in a single battle. Let's take the ludicrous case where a battle lasted 10 hours. If you lost that battle, you'd probably feel pretty dispirited about going back and rebuilding your deck to beat it. We want the opposite, where the battle is over pretty quickly so that you are generally OK with losing once or twice and rebuilding to try again. Also, it will be an issue of multi-player where I imagine we'll eventually implement some sort of multi-battle system with sideboarding in-between. If you have three battles of 20 minutes, you're talking about an hour for a full match, which is definitely on the long side already.
AI is typically faster than a player too, so while a single player match may be 20 minutes, a multi-player match may take upwards of 30 minutes.
Does that mean there's no 'death penalty' - you don't lose or damage gear / cards but get to reset, rebuild and re-try?
"This game is about building a community" Love it. Lots of great stuff in this interview--I can't wait to get my hands on the sum of these ideas. Also, nice Bohnanza shoutout!
Hopefully you're right. It would be more in-line with how people think of CCG's and board games: have some fun, and all you lose when you've "lost" is a little time.
Sometimes, I think I was the only person who found the concept of the MtG ante a really interesting feature of the game. I mean, I understand reasons why it's gone, but it really intrigues me still.
It was way back in ye olde dayes, so much so that I imagine that most Magic players today never knew of it at all.
Back in the early days, Magic the Gathering required each player to put one card aside from their deck at the start of every game as an ante. The winner of the game won the ante card from their opponent. The rule produced some pretty interesting early MtG cards, and was a big feature in MicroPose's old Magic computer game.
That's why it was dropped, though the mechanism is a very interesting one and does add a certain je ne sais quoi to the 'duel'.
What are you french now? Thats the 2nd time you guys said something i didnt understand. Thought i was old enough to know these silly words
"It has a certain 'Je ne sais quoi', but I don't know what it is." --Tim Stellmach, Thief: The Dark Project quote list. I did not realize I had been waiting since 1998 to pull that off. But the feeling of accomplishment is real.
