Three weeks later…

Hello everyone!

This year’s Gen con was an absolute blast, not the least of which was seeing people show up to our (almost sold out) ticketed events! Many thanks to all of you who came out to play Prime War and give feedback, your input was greatly appreciated, even if it was as simple as “That was fun!”.

After demoing Versus and Cooperative modes for roughly 80 people, we got a lot of feedback about how people felt about the system, the characters, and the game modes. The few people who got to play both modes over the weekend mentioned that cooperative play was noticeably more complex and felt a lot slower than the Versus play. While we were there, we made some tweaks between demos to attempt to streamline and speed up cooperative play, and we took notes about what players were enjoying and what was a headache so we could take that information home for reworks.

We’ve been working on new Cooperative material for the last few weeks, focused on drawing Cooperative play more in line with Versus play by reducing the additional rules overhead, removing half of the target selection calculation process when minions act, reducing the number of targets on the map at one time, and focusing more on heftier, character-level targets as threats to oppose the players. We played through a few games with the new Threats and had a ton of fun; the new format was running matches about 45 minutes for us, which was a significant decrease from the 1.5 – 2 hour matches we were previously playing. Some characters felt wimpy or outright useless in the previous version of cooperative play, but by shifting the focus from hordes of minions to small teams of character-level threats, we’ve brought everyone back to where they were designed to be: key players in high-stakes superhuman tactical combat.

We’re really excited about these modifications and we’ve given the new materials to the playtesters, so we’ll be evaluating their feedback over the next few weeks as we update the scenario materials for the cooperative missions. Very little of the narrative or objectives will need to change with this new update, so we will be moving pretty quickly as playtesters give us feedback. If you would like to playtest Prime War, be on the lookout for announcements coming from Greater Than Games asking for new testers. It’s not for everyone, as it involves playing a lot of material that is broken, unfinished, and lacking polish; however, all feedback is invaluable to us, as it helps make the game better.

We once again thank you all for your patience with this process, especially as it may seem to be dragging lately. We’re invested in making both modes of play into a fun experience for everyone who is interested, and that involves a lot of fine-tuning and revisions to make sure it’s as good as can be. We’ve been hesitant to mention anything about a timeline here, as that’s much more in Greater Than Games’ wheelhouse, and they have considerably more experience than we do in this arena. Lore Forge Games wants to make sure that we have everything done mechanically and thematically before we make any announcements regarding dates, and we’re just not there yet. The Cooperative play looks like its in a fairly good place with this latest update, and we’re hoping that playtesters are willing and able to jump in with both feet to help us push this down the track.

Until next time,

–Smith at the Forge