I did a search and was surprised there was no thread for the game yet, but the Skyrim meets Hearthstone game Bethesda announced last year went into open beta last week. You have to install the Bethesda.Net launcher to play, but the game is in a fairly polished state and is accepting real money for card packs.
The game is obviously highly influenced by Hearthstone, with the addition a number of twists. Standard games have two lanes for minions including one where minions are hidden for a round after played. There are no hero powers and every deck is built around one or two attributes like Agility or Strength and can draw from both pools of cards in addition to neutrals. The other big change is your hero has 5 runes that “pop” every 5 points of health you lose during a match. When that happens you get to draw an extra card, and if it carries the “Prophecy” attribute you can play it immediately for no mana cost, even if it’s the middle of your opponent’s turn.
Most interesting to me is the amount of single player content the game has. There’s a meaty story-based campaign which introduces you to the mechanics and then takes you through a bunch of crazy rule modified battles. It’s free as well, so you aren’t buying expansions if you want solo content like in Hearthstone. There’s a solo version of their Arena run as well.
So, is anyone else playing? What do you think? Feel free to friend me on Bethesda.Net if you want to play some matches. My username is BradGrenz.
I’m playing! I’m currently on Act 2, Chapter 9 of the Story mode, so I’m not ready for Versus Battle mode, yet. But I (LivinItUpInPhx) did send you a friend invitation.
Awesome. I love Hearthstone, but I’m a bit disheartened lately by the overall vision of that game’s design. I’m considering skipping the newest adventure, so this comes in at the perfect time for me. Hearthstone will still likely reign as king for me until perhaps ESL gets mobile support, but I’m very interested in checking this one out.
I signed up and played through the first bit of the campaign. Looks good so far, certainly enough for me to play the rest of the single player stuff. We’ll see how the rest holds up once I get done there. I’m ineffablebob, feel free to send friend invites.
I played through the first 10 or so single player missions. The mechanics are really solid, but I sure am missing the personality of Hearthstone. Maybe the storyline would resonate more if I was more familiar with the Elder Scrolls world , but I doubt it. Seems like pretty generic fantasy world stuff. I’ll keep playing because it’s fun, and perhaps the gameplay will be enough to hook me somewhere along the way. I like the multi-lanes mechanic a lot. It’s a straightforward layer of complexity. but it adds a lot of depth to the strategy. I’m less fond of the Prophecy mechanic, which is a bit too uncontrollable for my taste. My gut feeling is the Prophecy cards are too weak for their cost to make a whole deck out of them.
I finished it two nights ago and think it’s pretty good. And there’s a solo Arena challenge mode you can do after that which is pretty interesting and lets you earn rewards and complete quests for Gold.
I’ve had the beta for 13 days now. Haven’t had much fun with it. Not a fan of the art at all. I like some of the features (lanes and lane effects etc), but the game itself just isn’t grabbing me.
Still waiting to try out Gwent (whose beta was pushed back to October), but in the meantime, Hearthstone is scratching this particular itch.
After spending more than a few hours with this game, I will declare that I am enjoying it quite a bit. Hearthstone offers such a natural baseline to compare with, not only given its popularity but also that I have a good amount of experience with it. My problem with Hearthstone was ultimately that it was too simple to have long term appeal and a sufficient number of interesting decks to play. My other major complaint, as with many others I have seen on the internet, is that it relied more and more on dice rolls to determine the effects of cards. It gives the games a more chaotic and surprising feel, but ultimately made it more like Yahtzee than a CCG should ever be.
Compare that with Elder Scrolls: Legend. It is clearly a step down from Hearthstone in terms of polish and card art, although if you take Hearthstone out of the picture it compares well to all of the other digital CCG games I have played. I think it’s roughly on par with Magic Planeswalker games. It offers two lanes instead of Hearthstone’s one, and also has larger decks and a few new interesting mechanics. This gives the game enough depth to hold my interest (so far), I think the broad foundation gives them enough interesting things to do with cards to let them craft a few expansion sets without the needing of absurd stuff like Hearthstone. At the same time, it isn’t the slog that Magic can be so that matches still breeze by at a good speed.
Furthermore, the f2p model is generous, more so than Hearthstone. I have yet to spend a dime on the game (although I probably will give them some money in the near future) but have already completed a medium-length story run, four arenas (solo and online), and opened maybe 10 or so boosters. I feel like I have enough cards and soul gems (crafting works the same as Hearthstone) to make a couple of pretty good decks for online play. It has the same quest system as Hearthstone so you don’t need to spend anything at all to see your collection gradually grow.
The single player content should also broaden the appeal of the game. The story mode is pretty good for a CCG, offering a number of different twists as you go through (to the game mechanics not the plot, didn’t really pay attention to that) while also letting you try out multiple pre-made decks. The solo arenas are just brilliant, where you compete against a number of different AI decks before unlocking a boss to fight. It strikes a nice balance of difficulty as well, at least at my skill level of the game.
All in all, I think it’s well worth a try for anyone vaguely interested in these types of games. I haven’t had any troubles finding matches as quickly as I did with Hearthstone for either online arena or versus, and I have had some great close matches. Thumbs up, although with room for improvement.
