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jp's Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms (PC)
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| [May 28, 2021 10:29:49 AM]
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Oh, something I forgot to mention...
So from chests in addition to gold and equipment you can also get "items" that do things like upgrade your equipment or give you "free gold" (gives you 30 minutes of idle gold). However, there is also a potion (well there's at least two - I've seena medium potion of speed and a large potion of speed) that I think might be a dark pattern!
So, the potion of speed basically accelerates EVERYTHING in the game - how quickly your heroes attack, how quickly enemies attack, how quickly they spawn, etc. Now, you can't buy these directly - which is why it doesn't "feel" like a bad experience, but effectively these potions seem like a "pay to skip" pattern. It's a fast-forward. If it only accelerated your heroes, that would be different - but in an idle game, speeding everything up is...well, desirable? I mean, the game is designed on making grinding compelling (so it doesn't feel like grinding), but still. I think it's an interesting pattern and I wonder if it's been monetized directly in other games? (if so, that would definitely feel more like pay to skip).
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| [May 28, 2021 10:13:15 AM]
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I started playing this a few days ago out of sheer curiosity and, wow. I'm really impressed. I've played more than a few idle clicker games but this one is by far the most developed in terms of it being broad and offering lots of "content" for you to go through. It's also clearly being run as a service - with seasons and all that jazz.
What seems to be most interesting to me - in terms of the game's core structure - is that it's a wide not narrow idle game. By narrow I mean games where it might take you a while to "finish" the first loop or get to that point where it's convenient/smart to end and restart. Here, you decide to go on a quest where each quest is a number of levels that need to be cleared of enemies. Once you reach the end you can go "endless" or complete it at which point it resets. You can play the same mission again, or play a new mission (one that might have unlocked due to completing the previous one). And, there are a LOT of missions.
Of course, there are things that you can unlock that make future runs faster/easier. So, the game is WIDE because there are many, many missions and each run is "short" (you might leave a long one going over night and I think you can clear most within a day?). But, there are many missions - so you're always on a run of some sort.
Now, different missions have conditions and so on that make them well, different from each other. The core loop is that you have a hero that does damage and levels up, as you kill monsters you get money which you use to unlock more heroes following a pre-determined progression of heroes. Heroes go on the screen in certain slots - and different missions have different configurations of the layout of these slots. This matters because heroes have different buffs/abilities that are dependent on the slots (e.g. buff heroes adjacent to you, in front, behind, in the same column, etc.). So, as you activate new heroes you're also often shuffling them around on the screen to maximize DPS.
The game also goes WIDE because, over the years(?) new characters have been released! There are multiple characters for each "slot". Characters can also wear equipment (unique to each character - so at least you don't have to juggle items between characters). How do you get new characters? Some are made available for free, while others you buy with real-world money. How do you get equipment? From "lootboxes" (chests). You rarely get them from missions, you can buy some with gems (premium currency), but you really end up buying them via real-world money OR from codes.
It turns out there's a LOT of codes for free chests. I'm guessing 4-5 a week? I've been playing less than a week and I picked up a bunch of codes from websites but ALSO, and I thought this was pretty cool, there is twitch integration in the game. Now and then I get a little popup (that doesn't obscure the screen or cover gameplay) saying that so-and-so is now live on twitch and that if I head over there's a code for a free "Electrum" chest (which is better than the crappy wood chests I normally, but rarely, see). So, I clicked see the code on the stream, type it in and presto. This is the only reason I've been able to moderately equip the heroes I have (the each have 6 "slots" for equipment, none of them have all the slots occupied).
Futhermore, the game runs events - where you can unlock new stuff and play missions that (presumably) are available for a limited time. I'm currently doing a "Modron" mission just because I was curious - it unlocked (after 3 missions) 3 new characters and the next step is to do more missions to get special chests that (I think) will have equipment and nonsense for the special characters I unlocked...
...and on it goes.
As far as I can tell the game's been going for a while, there's tons of things there BUT I'm going to uninstall it because I know I'll get sucked in, get distracted from work and other stuff, and so on. But, like I said in the beginning - I'm REALLY impressed by how rich and wide the game is - it feels like a nice step "out" in terms of the evolution of the genre!
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jp's Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Something better came along
GameLog started on: Saturday 22 May, 2021
GameLog closed on: Friday 28 May, 2021 |
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