HEX Update – Building Arena

Hi HEXers. This weekend, we’ve once again made the Arena test server available for play. It’ll be up until Saturday evening PST, with the big load testing free tournament starting on Saturday at Noon [Worldclock]. For more information about the Arena test server and the free tournament, check out our announcement.

While you take a break from your battles, R&D’s Ryan Sutherland looks back on his first big task on the HEX team—the creation of the Arena decks.

Building the Bosses

“High in the Hyperborean Mountains lies an Arena fit for only the bravest of adventurers. Built by an order of all-powerful of ancient mages.”

Okay, well, maybe the bit about all powerful ancient mages is a bit of an exaggeration, considering I was there for the majority of the Frost Ring’s construction, but hey a game designer can dream right? My name is Ryan Sutherland, one of the designers on HEX, although for this project, I spent the majority of my time helping to develop the Frost Ring experience. Today I’ll be telling you about those early days of designing and playtesting the Arena, and we how we transformed a box full of playtest decks into Hogarth’s Frost Ring.

The Frost Ring, was first big project I worked on under the HEX umbrella. While the creative team was busy concocting the man behind the arena and the rest of the PVE team was tuning systems, Jason Zila and I were building all of the decks that would populate it. We knew that this would be the first toe dip for players into all of the PVE that we have planned for HEX. In that, there were significant challenges that we faced when making sure that we would offer a compelling experience. We wanted to make sure that you’d come back to Arena time and time again because you wanted to see everything it had to offer.

We wanted to makes sure that we got the most out of every deck we built, so that you don’t feel like you’re facing off against a bunch of cloned decks. Luckily, it turns out that when lead PVP designer Ben Stoll was building Shards of Fate and Shattered Destiny, he provided a wide variety of directions to go in for our base decks. Take three of our wild decks: Moon’airu Sensei, a Blood/Wild Tunneling themed deck, Seaweed Behemoth, a Sapphire/Wild charge themed deck and Avalanche Giant, a Ruby/Wild deck themed around Crush. While they all share the same base shard, they all provide a wildly different experience in the game.

There’s a large difference from making the most streamlined deck for a tournament rather than decks that are thematic, varied and fun to play against. As easy as it would have been to throw the most powerful cards into a bunch of decks and call it a day, they wouldn’t necessarily make for the most compelling gameplay. This is especially true when you step back and consider the wide gamut of players we serve. Our primary goal is to make the game fun for all players. Arena presents a variety of challenges, and therefore each boss presents a different puzzle to solve both in play and deck construction. For example, you’ll have to adapt your troop strategies as you won’t just play against Murder—you’ll see Inner Conflict, Buccaneer, Shatter Shield, Survival of the Fittest, Turbulence, and Feeding the Young Ones. We also love that you’ll see different card synergies, combos that you wouldn’t see in more streamlined, focused competitive Constructed decks. Maybe you’ll be inspired by one and build your own deck around it.

Once we had the variety pinned down, we set our sights on the series of bosses that would cap each tier. While the number of tiers we wanted to include fluctuated at different points in the development process, we knew we wanted to have the leaders of our races to serve as our gatekeepers between each tier and tie them to the thematics of what each represents in Entrath. I remember being assigned King Gabriel and knowing that I wanted to make sure that his deck featured every Inspire troop we had in the game. Gabriel and his subjects—and entire kingdom— uniting to defeat, well, us. As a contrast as to how the human ruler would fight in the Arena, I also worked on Xarlox who is attacking you both through his troops and by sabotaging your deck with his own Terrorantula eggs. A truly Vennen war style.

One of my best memories of building the Arena was when we were informed that we were going to add in a deck for Princess Cory himself. Jason and I helped Cory pick out his favorite cards from the first sets and when we had it laid out in front of us I asked Jason, “How is Princess Cory ever going to win?” I quickly offered to play as the player challenger for this matchup, because the deck appeared a mess, since it was a hodgepodge of rares from all shards, many of which had their own strategy that didn’t necessarily have a lot of synergies. After all, it’s not generally advisable that you get to throw Pack Raptor, The Kraken, and Extinction into the same deck and go crazy. A few hours and a dozen games later, I looked at Jason, feeling utterly defeated, and asked “How is Princess Cory ever going to lose?” It turned out that by giving Cory all the thresholds by default and allowing him to attack the player through a dozen different avenues, he may be chaotic, but that chaos proved to be its own strategy.

By the time that we were happy with each deck, we knew more about Hogarth, the crazed mage who ran the Frost Ring. We couldn’t just leave this guy sitting on the sidelines. At that point we came up with the Arena challenges, which added in an additional layer of variety to our Frost Ring. Arena challenges are a variety of ways Hogarth puts a new spin on an encounter. His arena, his rules. Sometimes it’s impartial, such as starting the game with an Inferno in play. Sometimes Hogarth is much more diabolical, giving the Arena a distinct edge against the player. However, if the player is able to succeed, Hogarth rewards them with a bonus against the next opponent. The beauty of this is that you’ll never know when the next challenge is going to come, and who knows what Hogarth has up his sleeve.

The first time we tested this system, the PVE boss was Construct Foreman, a deck that relishes in its opponents drawing cards and the challenge was that the Arena started with Cerebral Fulmination in play. I was playing as the Arena and I just cackled, quite like Hogarth, and knew we might be on to something.

When at last I got a chance to play on our test servers with the awesome new battle board and all of the iced champions, it felt fantastic seeing it all come together. After spending countless hours playing through the Frost Ring both in person and through our development and test servers, the most gratifying part of this project has been watching members of the community see the Arena’s various challenges for the first time and all of the decks they’ve been dreaming up with equipment to take it down.

Until next time, stay frosty.

FiveShards Ruby Cup, February 14-15

The third in the Shard Cup tournament series—the Ruby Cup—will happenFebruary 14-15th. The tournament is free and players will compete for over 500 booster packs, signed copies of a newly-released book, primal packs, cup points for an exclusive end-of-season tournament, and other prizes. The tournament will also offer free door prizes that you can win just by participating. Find out all you need to know about the tournament here: http://fiveshards.com/ruby-cup/

VIP Next Weekend

If you missed out on your chance to win alternate art Goremaster and Succulent Cluckadon last month, next weekend is your chance! This month’s format is Sealed Deck, so you’ll build your deck from six booster packs, 4 Shattered Destiny and 2 Shards of Fate. All start times are listed in Pacific, so check your local time here: [Worldclock]

Sealed Deck Entry Fee: VIP ticket + 1,400 plat or 6 packs + 200 plat

Friday: 10:00 AM, 7:00 PM

Saturday: 3:00 AM, 11:00 AM, 6:00 PM

Sunday: 9:00 AM

Players: 16 minimum – 128 maximum

Format: 4 rounds of Swiss

Prizes:

4 wins: 10 packs / 2 Goremaster AA / 2 Succulent Cluckodon AA / 70,000 gold

3 wins: 8 packs / 1 Goremaster AA / 1 Succulent Cluckodon AA / 35,000 gold

2 wins: 4 packs / 1 Goremaster AA / 1 Succulent Cluckodon AA / 20,000 gold

1 win: 2 packs / 10,000 gold

0 wins: 1 pack / 5,000 gold

Ghostbusters

This week, Cryptozoic launched the Ghostbusters board game to much fanfare and support. We here at HEX are super excited for the game and the people who worked on the project. A big ‘thank you’ goes out to everyone who came to Wednesday game night to help test, backed it, and/or shared the Kickstarter with their friends. Cory has written up a short piece about what Ghostbusters means to him.

I love Ghostbusters so much! I can vividly remember seeing it for the first time. Dropped off at the mall with a friend, pizza by the slice from the place next to Hot Dog on a Stick, couple of games of Punch Out at the arcade… then off to the movies.

Going into it I was pretty excited. I am a bit of a comedy nerd, I endlessly listen to stand up, and it started with SNL. I would sneak out of my room as a little kid and watch it as my dad slept on the couch, so by the time Ghostbusters rolled around I was already a very big fan of both Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd. On top of that, horror comedy is BY FAR my favorite genre of movie: Shaun of the Dead, Beetlejuice, Addams Family, and on and on. The spooky creepy thematic of horror married to the fun of comedy for me is the perfect combo.

Ghostbusters was a revelation, before that horror comedies were pretty slim pickings. Creepshow and American Werewolf in London were good, but the “comedy” side of those was pretty slim and the “horror” of something like Young Frankenstein was just not doing it. For me, Ghostbusters was the first REAL horror/comedy that offered both parts in high quality. Ghostbusters set the stage for some of my favorite films and will always be one of my favorites.

Having the chance to launch a Ghostbusters game is a huge honor and one of the things I am most proud of is that Cryptozoic is a part of it. The Cryptozoic team has done a tremendous job crafting a VERY fun game and the attention to detail on every bit and piece of the miniatures is really phenomenal. Beyond the game, the entire CZE team has put a ton of work into the Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter and miniatures are a very interesting match, as it allows the game maker to understand the volume of minis being created and use that to the gamer’s advantage (by adding more and more content into the product as the level of backing increases, this can lead to a really amazing value for the backer).

If you’re a fan of Ghostbusters, I hope you get a chance to check out the Kickstarter, it’s really great and off to an amazing start.

-Cory

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