- It’s free to play and you win cards by playing the game, not by buying expensive booster packs.
- Search dungeons to find treasure and then equip your loot to build out your decks.
- Use your cards to move your characters and battle monsters’ decks.
We’re taking two great flavours and combining them into something new. Classic fantasy adventuring meets collectible card gaming and the result is entirely new. Tired of pressing buttons while grinding away at quests? Card Hunter is all about skill – your skill at deck building and playing your cards. Tired of paying for endless new card sets? Card Hunter lets you win by playing, not by paying
To me it’s giving a hint of games like Battlelore, so the deck controlling what you can do, mixed with Magic and other CCG/TCGs, so actually building the deck, then mixed with an RPG dungeon crawl campaign. It’s got a grid, it’s got loot, it’s got stats, it’s got persistence, it sounds great.
There’s more about it here at Gamasutra. It says there will probably be a beta towards the end of this year, with the launch early next year. It also says Richard Garfield is working on it (creator of M:TG.)
And another site says they have plans to make an iOS version.
I agree with you, btw. This sounds too good to be true. I’ve found myself getting bored of computer games, and much more enamoured with tabletop games. I’ve boiled it down to either liking the unpredictability of the multiplayer aspect, including the social side (which could be why I like MMOs as well) or liking the almost tactile state of the readiness and apparent nature of the rules. This looks like it will put in a computer game what I love about boardgames. The only way it gets better would be if they added co-op, which they say is a possibility on their forums, should people want it, along with tournament play (first goal is the single-player though.)
If this were a retail game my anticipation would be skyrocketing. But as a Free to Play game I’m trying to temper my excitement. Will the FtP mechanism ruin the game? My ideal would be if the FtP basically just amounts to a demo, and then you pay a set amount to get access to the full game. I don’t want a stream of micro transactions.
They’ve answered some questions on their forums relating to their business model.
[INDENT]Can players play the game each day as long as they like or do they have only a limited amount of actions they can take like in some other browser games?[/INDENT] No plans to do that.
[INDENT]Are those adventure modules going to be purchasable with ingame cash or do you have to use real money to buy them?[/INDENT] There will be a large number of adventures that will be free. There will probably also be some that you have to pay (real money) for.
[INDENT]How will micro-transactions work if the game is free to play and you get new cards by playing?
[/INDENT]Micro-transactions will probably be used in the sense that you’ll be able to buy an in-game currency that you can use to spend on vanity items or to accelerate your loot/card gathering. It will probably be a lot like other free-to-play MMOs like D&D Online (just to pick an example).
There were only two threads active there when I visited a few hours ago. I suspect there won’t be much more answers until much later in the day seeing as its night time in Australia.
Can players play the game each day as long as they like or do they have only a limited amount of actions they can take like in some other browser games?
No plans to do that.
That makes me feel better. I don’t actually mind paying for content (eg expansions, classes etc). I just don’t want to feel like the game design has been hobbled by microtransaction logic.
Lets go ahead and put this game in the “exciting” basket. :)
Theoretically it should have better AI. MtG was designed for humans, but this game is designed as a game, so the designer should be able to steer clear of rules that are too difficult for an AI to understand.
Then again, some game designers just design the coolest game they can think of, and then try to make the AI cope. see Civ V, Total War, Solium Infernum.
Oh hey, speaking of Magic, the guy that invented that is working on this as well. That (and the other credits among members of the team) gives me some amount of confidence.
The designer pedigree is great and the concept sounds terrific, but the F2P angle is making me wary. Despite their intentions, I’ve seen many F2P games turn into money grinds. The desire for profit just outweighs all other considerations after a point.
Hopefully, they can stick to their promises. I’ll keep an eye on it.
This looks really cool and I’m going to follow it’s development with interest now that I know about it. Thanks for sharing this Buceph!
The F2P thing bothers me as well, but I’m really hoping the proliferation of F2P recently means that we’re on the path to some companies finally figuring it out. In my opinion, the best way to make F2P a success is to have a great base product that everyone agrees is fun and well designed, have free content for it from the get go, then develop additional content that players pay for once they are comfortable with game mechanics and are looking for more content. A simple example of something close to this would be how LOTRO does F2P. You can play practically the whole game for free, but if you want more content you purchase quest packs to unlock it.
With a game like this one the old tendency would be to make you purchase new cards as the pay-to-play content. It sounds like they’re moving away from that and will instead offer new adventure modules to play through as the pay-to-play element. That would be great, as I’d be happy to pay a few bucks to get my hands on a couple of new adventures to play through once I was good and hooked on the basic game mechanics.
Micro-transactions will probably be used in the sense that you’ll be able to buy an in-game currency that you can use to spend on vanity items or to accelerate your loot/card gathering.
It doesn’t sound bad until you realize that accelerating the card gathering is really the same as just giving more cards to the guy that spends more money. If not done correctly, it could really upset the balance of the game.
Except the game is described as being “largely a single player experience”. There isn’t really any balance to be had between yourself and other players, as it doesn’t sound like the main game has you going head-to-head with anyone. If that’s the case, then it wouldn’t matter if John Moneybags dropped $100 on loot acceleration except that he might have some extra cosmetic BS to show off in whatever passes for the lobby in the game.
Sure, but the point of the game is to acquire new cards to make better decks with which to battle whether thats SP or MP. If they restrict the card gathering rate low enough, then choosing not to accelerate that rate could make progressing in the game really frustrating. (The cliche F2P grind.) I’m not dead set on them not making money, but from my experience these Q&A sessions with devs of F2P games always sound super-terrific-we-will-not-punish-free-players-we-promise but the reality seems to be the complete opposite.
OK, I see what you’re saying now, and I agree. It’s going to really suck for F2P players if they can get into a situation where not having the right cards can halt their advancement and getting those right cards can only be accomplished using the pay-to-play “accelerators”.
I would rather see a model similar to my original post where instead of the cards being the limitor on F2P, it’s the content. Play F2P as long as you like and collect all the cards you can, but with the knowledge that you’re restricted to the free “adventures”, and you’ll have to pay to unlock more content (with maps to explore, creatures to battle and cards to collect) when you’re bored of the free stuff. That would be a F2P model I could get behind.
Hey, nice to be able to talk about the game finally! I’ve been working on this (along with the rest of the team) for quite a while now.
I’ll address one of the easy questions first… about the AI and the game mechanics. When I designed this game one of my primary goals was to make sure that it was fun to play against an AI. Much as I love really deep strategy games, I am constantly disappointed when the AI can’t put up a challenge.
This is even more of a problem when you are talking about an online game where the AI has to run on a server along with everyone else’s game and whatever else the server is having to do at the time.
So we did a couple of things that I think are going to help. One is that we try to build the intelligence into the monster decks. That is, the selection and distribution of cards in the decks is a big part of the challenge, rather than the way in which the AI has to play them out. The second thing that goes along with that is that the range of options the AI has in any one turn is relatively limited. The game doesn’t have to mull over 10,000 possibilities - it just has to figure out which card to play when. And because the game is asymmetric, the AI can be hard to beat without having to out-think you.
The flipside of that is - are the enough choices for the player to make and chances for the player to play well? Balancing those two things has been a big design problem but I think we’re doing pretty well. The AI is pretty early in development yet but it’s already fun and challenging to play against.
I can’t say we’ve entirely solved this problem yet but it’s fully on our radar and we have plans to deal with it.
