Dream Equipment Change

By Lead Developer HEXSirHamsterlot

Today, we made development adjustments to all the reward equipment tied to the Tranquil Dream dungeon and we want to address the reasons that we decided to make those changes. Initially the goal of designing those equipment was to offer an interesting new deck that really tied all of the “Dream” reward cards together that would incentivize a new deck. Although the execution did accomplish that goal, the Dream deck ended up in a place where the R&D felt that it was damaging the Campaign experience.

One of the biggest issues we had is that this gear didn’t require you to actually have any of the thresholds. This goes against a lot of what our game abides by— each shard has its own effects and themes that we stay true to in order to give each shard their own specific feel and play. Players can mix and match shards to shore up vulnerabilities that one shard has with the strengths from the second shard. For example, Blood doesn’t have great options for handling opposing constants, so if you wanted to have a blood deck that could destroy constants you could use Wild or Diamond cards to help with that. Unfortunately these equipment completely subvert that aspect of our game. When these were able to be discarded without any threshold requirement they were working around this fundamental philosophy allowing you free access to cards without having the shards threshold. This essentially made these cards to function like shardless cards and is not what was intended.

The next unfortunate issue that these equipment have is that there isn’t any real interaction with an opponent or with other cards. It is too self-sufficient and its works as a pass/fail by just discarding as many of these on the first turn and bringing them all back to play with the Dream Staff equipment of Enter the Dream. The way that this ended up playing does not lead towards the most satisfying experience or even intended experience. Too frequently this deck will end games with such a small amount of interaction that there are no interesting decisions to make.

These also harmed the general sense of progression in the game. Most games play out with playing resources and cards with costs equal to your resources. This allows the game to progress over time with playing bigger and better things. Although part of the intention was to grant players access to skipping over this by being able to put cards with cost greater than your available resources into play. The rate at which it was doing this was too fast. With the new execution we feel as though we found the correct middle ground. These will still allow you to get troops into play with cost greater than your resources but it is now tweaked to be more in line with the regular flow of our game.

Lastly the deck placed far too much emphasis on luck of the draw. Your only goal was to just get as many of these in your opening hand as possible. That doesn’t offer the player options to really interact with. At the end of each game the wins are not particularly satisfying and the loses are irritating as you feel as though it was out of your control as to whether you won or lost.

As with all PvE content, equipment will always be subject to change if we feel as though it is harmful to the experience of Hex TCG. With these changes to the Dream equipment, we feel as though the deck still has a place in our game. Now the deck construction and decisions in the game will be more compelling and interactive. Players will need to explore different ways to piece together the best way to execute this combination of equipment with their deck, as well as there will be more decisions to make in game to have these equipment come together in a beautiful crescendo.