schild wrote: I mean, who was asking for siege mode? I understand people are excited, but it's pretty easy to excite people with a mediocre beverage when they've been wandering through a desert.





Anyway, we wanted the next evolution of Magic as a genre touchstone and we've gotten 1.1 instead of 2.0.



I don't know how many times I have to say this or how many ways I have to phrase it, but to beat the best you've got to be the best. And right now they haven't hit the bare minimum required to be the best.



I don't think they need to be the best (their limited resources makes it hard to complete against giants like Blizzard and Hasbro), but they do need to carve out a niche for themselves and execute on that thoroughly.Their efforts have been too spread out and they had a spray and pray kind of approach hoping that they'd have a bit of everything and they could find something that sticks. But in this current market as an indie if there's nothing truly outstanding about your product that can't be found elsewhere, it's hard for you to convert/retain new players (who won't give you the time to explore all your hidden intricacies) and consequently also hard for word-of-mouth growth to occur. PvE is that opportunity for them but unfortunately they really blew a lot of time & resources there developing a convoluted Adventure Zone concept with super complex side systems (racials, talent trees and mercenaries) but with a core game that lacked any social side, substance, end-game, replayability.The logical evolution from that experiment and the perceived bottlenecks (at least from my point of view, and I've been vocal about this for years) was to rely on a user generated content model. It was clear that even if you created more highly sought out features like raids or co-op, there wasn't going to be enough content to keep those players entertained long enough until new content is generated. The beauty of TCGs is that there are insane amount of permutations that are possible just from rearranging certain cards, champions, and other deck customization options (which pretty much any player can do fairly competently, unlike say creating a new interesting Mario level which is much harder if you're not a pro designer). So yeah, Keeps/Siege makes a ton of sense as a mode and serves as an excellent base (contrary to FRA/AZ) upon which to build more exciting PvE aspects/features.Watching the dev stream few days ago reconfirmed all those theories I had and really gives me something tangible (not some faint KS dream) to get excited to brainstorm, play, and witness its evolution. I had a ton of fun watching Ryan/Jared playing it and I think it can remain fresh for a long time as long as they keep building it out slowly with new quirks. I've already written an extensive post of what I feel the mode can evolve into, so I won't reiterate that, but I think it has the potential to be a great stand-alone feature that is platform agnostic, caters to different player types, limitless/sustainable/ever-green in terms of content, social/MMOish, competitive, streamable, easy understandable/digestable, and most importantly: fun.