Absinthe
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2012
- Messages
- 4,062
I'd like to point out the following:Played the beta nearly every day, from November 2016 until it ended in late 2018. Was utterly hooked. Tried very hard to like Homecoming, but haven't touched it since March 2019.
These are the things that dismayed me:
There was also an expansion after I quit the game. My most anticipated faction (Temple / Eternal Fire) was introduced, but as an archetype within a Novigrad thief guild faction.
- Loss of identity. It didn't really look or feel like Gwent any more, so it lost most of its charm. It went from being an upbeat tavern card game, to having a semi-realistic battlefield with awkward leader puppets next to the cards. It doesn't even look like the minigame from TW3 any more. It was so different that CDPR even removed the iconic Gwent music from the game.
- The obligatory deck size was doubled, trainer cards were removed, and you could only have 2 version of bronze card (instead of 3). So instead of building consistent decks and reliably drawing nearly all your cards, decks felt incoherent and there was much more randomness.
- I think the removal of the siege row wasn't done for gameplay reasons, but to optimize Gwent for mobile devices. This limited our gameplay options, especially since CDPR also restricted how many cards could be placed on a row (from endless, to 9).
- CDPR restricted how many non-unit cards you could use in your deck. This hampered innovation in deck building, and felt like a ham-fisted 'solution' to pure non-unit decks.
- The game felt much more casual in general. In beta I struggled to reach the top rank (21), didn't always make it. But in Homecoming I easily cruised to the new top rank (1) early in each season. Maybe because so many veteran players had abandoned the game.
- All the archetypes I'd known and loved were deleted and replaced by what I perceived to be very simplified alternatives.
- Some card art and voice lines were being altered to make them more family friendly (to please Chinese censors perhaps). It detracted from the 'Witcher feel', which has always had mature content and adult language.
- I felt like CDPR lied to us about Homecoming. They said they'd bring the game back to the roots (after the Midwinter RNG fiasco etc.), instead they radically changed it into something else. I think they went all-in on Thronebreaker and only left a skeleton crew working on Gwent.
Has Gwent improved in any significant way since then? Any reason to give it another shot? I demoralized myself just writing this, but I guess it's worth asking. If at least a few of the points above aren't valid any longer, perhaps I'll convince myself to give it a go.
On #2, not only did RNG increase drastically and consistency suffer horribly (mostly because devs seemed to enjoy the Hearthstone RNG-heavy gameplay, even though if Gwent players wanted Hearthstone they'd be playing Hearthstone, not Gwent), but they also removed tutor cards, Reconnaissance, First Light, deck-thinning tools, etc. Witcher trio became an iconic staple in Homecoming simply because it granted you tempo and deckthinning.
On #3, yep, it was done for mobile. And the scumbags had the temerity to lie and claim that Gwent wasn't going to go mobile (like everyone knew they obviously were building up to) until they declared the mobile release anyway. This was their idea of handling fallout. As for the row restriction, it existed in pre-HC Gwent too, but the row reduction made it much more awkward to deal with, and you usually wouldn't because then you would end up playing into things like Geralt: Igni, Skellige Storm, and various effects that hit a whole row. But HC Gwent not only reduced rows to 2 but created modal abilities that require you to play cards in specific rows for the effect you want.
#4 was obviously a fucking horrible band-aid solution to the early HC artifact+spell decks that would use Epidemic and the like to blow up enemy units all the time, showing how much the game had deteriorated.
#5 is absolutely true. It was deliberately made to be more casual because the HC devs were Hearthstone-loving tools who no doubt loved these sorts of changes because it made the game so much more fun for them now that you no longer had to worry as much about getting stomped by skilled players when you put everyone at the mercy of shitty RNG and lower the skill ceiling massively.
#8, it wasn't that they lied about Homecoming. It was that they had no clue wtf they were doing, Thronebreaker spiraled into a bigger project than it was intended to be, and all the devs started trying to fix Midwinter Gwent with the same thinking that was used to create it, and ended up developing Midwinter On Steroids instead. The worst part of that was that they went back on their promises keep players in the loop on any upcoming changes, solicit their feedback, and try to avoid doing big sweeping changes again. What little information did get out (row reduction, provisioning system, only golds and 2x bronzes now) had feedback that was massively negative, and the response for the devs were "eh, players will always bitch. Don't worry. We're the pros. We know what we're doing. You'll love it when we're done." And lo and behold, people didn't love it. Those HC devs just shat up their own game and are now in the business of bleeding it for cash until it dies.
On #3, yep, it was done for mobile. And the scumbags had the temerity to lie and claim that Gwent wasn't going to go mobile (like everyone knew they obviously were building up to) until they declared the mobile release anyway. This was their idea of handling fallout. As for the row restriction, it existed in pre-HC Gwent too, but the row reduction made it much more awkward to deal with, and you usually wouldn't because then you would end up playing into things like Geralt: Igni, Skellige Storm, and various effects that hit a whole row. But HC Gwent not only reduced rows to 2 but created modal abilities that require you to play cards in specific rows for the effect you want.
#4 was obviously a fucking horrible band-aid solution to the early HC artifact+spell decks that would use Epidemic and the like to blow up enemy units all the time, showing how much the game had deteriorated.
#5 is absolutely true. It was deliberately made to be more casual because the HC devs were Hearthstone-loving tools who no doubt loved these sorts of changes because it made the game so much more fun for them now that you no longer had to worry as much about getting stomped by skilled players when you put everyone at the mercy of shitty RNG and lower the skill ceiling massively.
#8, it wasn't that they lied about Homecoming. It was that they had no clue wtf they were doing, Thronebreaker spiraled into a bigger project than it was intended to be, and all the devs started trying to fix Midwinter Gwent with the same thinking that was used to create it, and ended up developing Midwinter On Steroids instead. The worst part of that was that they went back on their promises keep players in the loop on any upcoming changes, solicit their feedback, and try to avoid doing big sweeping changes again. What little information did get out (row reduction, provisioning system, only golds and 2x bronzes now) had feedback that was massively negative, and the response for the devs were "eh, players will always bitch. Don't worry. We're the pros. We know what we're doing. You'll love it when we're done." And lo and behold, people didn't love it. Those HC devs just shat up their own game and are now in the business of bleeding it for cash until it dies.
You also missed changes like increasing the card draws for each round and inflicting hand size limits, which was deliberately done to further ruin tempo (provisioning system already shat on this) because now there was no value in things like passing early, dry passing, and trying to create extremely short rounds (because they would draw a lot of cards before each round anyway).
Well, some of us do enjoy playing Chess and Chess-like strategic games, but Chess does not have the room for mindgames and deckbuilding that Gwent does. I also just enjoyed changing decks to deal with what's going on in the current meta, making my own decks, or making unusual variations on decks. Most people for instance don't exactly bother doing strange things like Veterans where Crach pulls Ocvist. So it was easier for me to keep the game fresh because I would sit there and try to craft another fun deck that hasn't quite been meta. The potential for mindgames is also pretty deep (although it depends on your deck - there are some decks that demand very consistent setups to the point that your plays are mostly already decided for you). And there are decks that specialize in abusing the ability to control round length to win games.
Never played Hearthstone tbh. Never appealed to me.
It's not doing okay. It's hemorrhaging players. They regularly advertise to people who left the game to try coming back now because they're sure to love the latest trash content update. The devs have no idea what they're doing anymore at this stage and are mostly just throwing out random ideas and doing intentional powercreep expansions to try to induce spending for more kegs. The store is also trying to sell overpriced garbage bundles to newcomers now because they need the money. They closed down the console editions because they were unprofitable. They caved and did a Steam release (which they said they'd never do) because they were that desperate for players. And I'm pretty sure people are still losing interest in this game and no longer spending money on it. Game's just dying and the ongoing strategy is to try to cash out and drag out its death as much as possible.
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