That’s too bad. It’s a decent game with some fun mechanics, but the client is still shitty years later, and trying to launch a new CCG when your name isn’t Pokemon or Magic was always pretty foolhardy. They should’ve figured out a way to go F2P long ago.
Sadly, yeah. The one thing that got me excited about Hex was the original PvE vision they had. It was the thing that separated them from the zillion other CCGs out there. It was the primary reason I wanted to play the game. The PvP part of it was totally ‘meh’ and more of the same old, same old.
I think they made some bad business decisions there and severely underestimated what completing the PvE portion would have meant to the viability of the game long term. I understand that they felt they needed to sell cards to stay afloat but I don’t think that was ever really going to work out.
They…are F2P? I assume you mean a different way of monetizing it.
Also, Magic’s been doing a terrible job of handling the digital space, and I really think that Hex could have stolen the wind out from under their sails if they’d been faster to ramp up and pushed their actual selling point - PvE - in a way they haven’t. Though the game to beat digitally has never been Magic, it’s Hearthstone. And as much as I think Hex is 10 times better as a game, I don’t know that they were ever gonna be able to tangle with Blizzard.
Nominally, I guess, in PvE. But the decks that a brand new free account comes with is straight-up commons. You’ll get a few PvE-only cards from the questing and some of those sad little adventure packs. Those will help a little, but trying to complete the PvE with only the cards you can get for free is an exercise in frustration.
Forget about trying to play constructed or drafting as F2P. There are plenty of more or less successful existing examples of how to build a F2P CCG, and none of them are Hex.
I mean, I Kickstarted the thing, so I don’t have first-hand experience, but I’m told it’s perfectly possible to get a competitive deck for either PvP or PvE by grinding gold and picking up singles on the auction house or trade channel. But then again, I haven’t played a digital TCG where I would describe the free experience as anything other than grindy and frustrating. I don’t really see the problem with dropping a few Hamiltons to jump start the experience, myself. The only reason I haven’t done that in other TCGs is that I have Hex and it does what I want better, and you really can’t reasonably spend on more than one TCG at a time unless you’re far richer than I.
Well, anything’s possible if you’re willing to put enough hours into it, I suppose. I created a new account a few months ago to see what the non-KS player experience was like…it would not be compatible with taking part in any kind of outside activities other than grinding the Arena if you want to get anywhere, was my experience.
Really? Have you played Gwent, Shadowverse, Eternal, that Might & Magic game (now sadly defunct)? These games shower a new player in cards and packs (especially Shadowverse, which has to be the most generous free-to-play game I’ve ever played). Even the new MTG Arena is far more generous with cards and in-game currency than Hex, and it’s probably the stingiest of the recent wave of digital card games…mostly because they can be, I assume.
Hearthstone can certainly be a grind, though, that’s true. One of the many reasons I don’t play that game.
Ok, to be fair I’ve only really tried Hearthstone, which people praised to the high heavens for being generous and which I thought was a stingy and really dispiriting free player experience. So I’m definitely making overgeneralizations there. But it’s an experience that makes me skeptical when people claim other TCGs are generous, and IMO, collectible card games are like MMOs - it’s awful tough to get into more than one of them at a time. So short of a compelling PvE mode I’ve not had any real incentive to try, and Hex is the only one I’ve seen that feels like they took PvE seriously. Except maybe Gwent, but last I heard their campaign wasn’t in yet.
Edit: That said, Hearthstone is literally the most popular digital CCG on the market and their freemium model is some hot bullshit, IMO. So I’m not sure that’s Hex’s biggest problem.
No, I agree with you there. Hex’s biggest problem is that the lack of new blood means that the only people left in the queues are the sharks with highly tuned decks (in constructed) or encyclopedic knowledge of the card sets (in limited). Your basic noob is going to be nothing more than prey for the predators in that situation They’re not likely to last long enough to be induced to spend any money.
Another problem being that I’m not sure Kickstarting a collectible card game is the best way to get it off the ground. They’ve set up their most loyal customers with piles of free drafts and cards…for the life of the game.
On the other hand, it’s an incentive to keep checking back in (I’d have a lot fewer hours clocked if I didn’t have free drafts) and, at least in theory, providing playerbase for the competitive side. I don’t know if I would even have still been paying attention by the time they implemented PvE content without my KS rewards, either. Plus I don’t know about other KS backers, but even with the Grand King tier rewards there’s still tons of cards I don’t own and I’ve gone on buying sprees with my tax refund a couple times. Granted, with a third party site, but said site literally operates tournaments with them, so I have to assume that Hex Entertainment is a-okay with that and gets something out of third party sales.
I’m biased, but for my money their biggest problem is that they’re concentrating most on PvP and not PvE. Sure, PvP card sets and tournaments are their mainstay cash sources (and they have only themselves to blame for setting it up that way), but with PvP they’re competing with literally dozens of other games and they have neither the deep pockets of a major corporation and a popular IP (Hearthstone), the deep pockets of a major corporation and a pre-existing audience (the various digital Magic games), nor any major format changes that stand out from the crowd (your Duelysts and such). I think their card design is great and way more interesting than Magic’s doing, and definitely way more interesting than Hearthstone, but it’s tough to sell that at the door. And then you end up with the issue that most competitive games that don’t hit it big run into, like you mention: dwindling numbers overall and everyone that’s stuck around is really good at the game and it’s not a friendly environment for newbies. Plus the fact that while KS backers didn’t get a direct advantage in PvP games, they certainly have a running start on card pool.
But very few of those games have any PvE beyond tutorial bots. I don’t think a single one could be said to be focusing on PvE in any significant way, and in the few cases where they have solo content, even campaigns, it seems largely pitched at getting people started on PvP and/or giving them cards to use in PvP (Adventures in Hearthstone, for example, are apparently looked at only as card dispensers or they wouldn’t be rotating them out of availability when their cards are no longer standard legal). Certainly none of them have the extensive and robust design Hex offers, with its RPG style character development, PvE-specific card pool, equipment, mercenaries, and so on. If Hex really leant into that, they could be fucking kings of that market. Or at any rate, they certainly could have if they’d done it from the beginning, since even the games that do have real PvE content now either didn’t exist or didn’t have PvE at the time.
Now, I don’t know the costs involved, or what a good monetization strategy for that content looks like. So maybe it just wasn’t practical. But dammit, it’s their unique selling point.
for what it’s worth, Eternal has pretty decent PvE. There are formats where you can play constructed or limited against bots (well, in both cases, against bots with constructed decks) and they can play them at about 90% efficiency. They’re predictable but competent.
I’m not tremendously excited by just one off bot matches, especially if it’s just a bot playing the PvP game instead of a human. Like I say, Hex has RPG levelling with character traits, hundreds of PvE specific cards, equipment that modifies (sometimes radically) the effects of thousands of cards both PvP and PvE, mercenaries with unique powers and special deckbuilding restrictions, and an (incomplete) campaign with narrative, all sorts of special encounters and sometimes hidden criteria for earning special rewards, and branching dungeons with dungeon-long buffs and debuffs. If anyone else is doing PvE to that standard, I would sure like to know because I suspect I’ll need a new game one of these days in the not too distant future. But the absolute closest I’ve heard is a couple games (Elder Scrolls Legends, Gwent, like one or two others) either having or working on story campaigns and it’s not clear to me that that means more than a series of bot matches using PvP cards with some narration to either side.
It’s a shame that the game’s future is looking grim. I played a lot of it and enjoyed the single player aspect of a CCG. I played some multiplayer, but the slow pace and the necessary investments drove me away after short time.
Hex did some interesting things with classes, but I prefer a less linear experience where I cand collect the whole gamut of cards and adapt to the different challenges rather than specialize. Basically, I want a modern take on the Shandalar experience from the old Microprose game.
There isn’t currently a way in the campaign to build a completely unrestricted deck, but mercenaries really open up a huge variety of options and your mercenary party is another consideration for things like dungeons.
Me too. There has to be a lot of us out there so I wonder why no one’s tried to make a game like that? Seems like there’d be a lot of demand for it. There were a ton of us that were excited about Hex’s original PvE vision just for that very reason, I suspect.
I mean, for my tastes what Hex has done is a lot more fun than Shandalar (not least because the RPG stuff is more robust and the underlying card game is better). But I don’t think it’s hard to see why digital card games in general have been going for a booster pack model over Shandalar’s one off purchase w/ expansions. Namely, you can make a shitload more money the exploitative way.
Or you have that potential, anyway. What I think people are going to find is that, like with the original physical TCG boom in the 90s, there’s really only market space for maybe a couple of games with that model to thrive and they’re already doing it.
Every time this thread is bumped I think about large intestines.
As anyone who’s been paying attention to the game probably has been aware, it’s been reeeal quiet on Hex news for over a year now, with it seeming like the game was not long for this world. I was checking the news page every week but it was just copy pasted tournament nonsense. Then I skip a week and
Cory writes an open letter! Not a lot of concrete details so take with a grain of salt, but it sounds like they are planning a relaunch with an emphasis on what I was actually there for (PvE) and collection carryover. I really hope that goes well.
Interesting. A potential relaunch with carryover is definitely better than the current zombie state with a stagnant card pool and never enough people playing to fire tournaments. Sad, but as you said, the writing has been on the wall. Sounds like it’s still pretty speculative and quite a ways off, but I wish them luck.
Still a very good game that I’m glad to have played. Got many happy hours out of it, and more than doubled my initial monetary outlay by selling off extra cards. But yeah, the single-player stuff never quite came together the way I hoped it would.
Welp, looks like they’re taking it off of life support.
Bummer. I had a lot of fun with Hex, for a while.