On the recommendation of Russell Glasser, I gave Hearthstone a whirl today. I was impressed — that is one slick piece of work. I had no idea what to do or how it worked, but it’s beautifully designed and led me through the gameplay entirely painlessly — and even with a fair bit of fun. I enjoyed it, but I don’t know that I’ll get addicted to it. I guess I’m just not into card games.
The other game I tried out today is the fad of the hour: Pokemon Go. I have never played Pokemon before; my kids were all into it on their gameboys, and they also played the card game, but I was a very bad dad and didn’t join in at all. So this thing was a complete mystery to me, and still is. Unlike Hearthstone, the explanations within the game are virtually nonexistent, and you have to just stumble around and try to figure out what the heck to do.
I finally figured out the first bit, and Mary and I went on a nice sweaty (it’s hot!) walk around the neighborhood and caught Pidgees and Weedles and a Bulbasaur and an Oddish and an Evee. Unfortunately, now I have no idea what to do with them, now that I’ve got them, because the game just assumes you’re a Pokemon pal already. If you’ve got any hints, let me know.
One nice thing is that they’re both free. I guess there’s stuff you can buy as you get further into them, but I’m so dang casual there’s probably not much risk of temptation.
Yeah Pokemon Go isn’t much of a Pokemon game. It’s got the basic idea of catching a Pokemon (though not all of them) and sort of battling, but that’s kind of it. Seems like they tried to stamp Pokemon colors on a different game. I have to admit though it is a really cool to see such a different kind of social experience with a video game. Even if it won’t last long without depth. I think the next step is to go to a “gym” and join a team to try and take over that gym.
Armed Robbers Used Pokemon Go App to Target Victims, According to Cops
Not available in Europe yet. So unfair. :'(
This is pretty much Blizzard’s M.O. these days. Take a well established game type, add little to no innovation, and instead rely on excellent polish and cartoony art to carry the day. Their games are done to a very high production standard and are always welcoming to newcomers, but the cynic in me wishes it didn’t seem so much like simply moving in and usurping the fanbase of a genre with their much higher development budget.
That’s my biggest criticism of pokemon go, that there’s not much to do in the game. You can wonder around and throw pokeballs at pokemon, and battle at a gym if you find one, but as a player of the first pokemon game I’m disappointed that you can’t actually battle wild pokemon or other people. It’s like they left out 3/4 of the game.
@Holms: Hearthstone, Heroes and ?
Sure, it’s a bit lame, but I don’t really think it’s fair to call it their M.O.
@1 bricewgilbert:
They actually did take a lot from the ARG game Ingress, transferring over the database of real-world locations. The mechanics are… slightly different, though.
#6
Starcraft. Which may sound weird, as they defined the ‘fast RTS’ genre themselves with SC1, but that was near 20 years ago, and SC2 was simply a rehash. Gorgeous rendered scenes, high production values everwhere, but no new ideas.
Oh! And Diablo 3. Gone was the ‘dirty photoreal’ aesthetic from D2, everything was cartoonified, because that’s almost the only art style they seem to know how to do lately. And that fucking dialogue! Dear god it was cliched. All of their games ham it up to a certain extent, with heroes and villains alike chewing scenery rather than talking, but D3 took the script to the level of farce. Ugh, I’m sure that damn plot made me more stupid merely for having played the game.
That’s why I like it, it’s not too involved and it makes me exercise more. I played it for the first time yesterday and it turned a 1.5 mile walk into a 2.5 mile walk just following the rustling leaves.
Plus I kinda like the AR aspects of it, actually seeing the Pokèmon and actually throwing poke balls at them makes me feel like an actual trainer. I haven’t done any battling yet, so we’ll see how that goes
Oh, and PZ, pokemon go is mostly about walking around and collecting pokemon, but you can also find pokestops to collect items and gyms to battle pokemon. As I understand it, the locations in the game were taken from an earlier game, which were mostly recommended by technocentric youth, so I expect you’ll find a pokestop or gym every dozen feet at UMM.
For a relatively-short turn-based strategy, I recommend Armello by Australian League of Geeks. It has simple rules, an excellent tutorial, and single or multi-player. Players vie to usurp the king at the center of the small world.
The young person was happy about Pokemon Go, but was unable to explain it to me.
@6 Anders Kehlet:
Hearthstone (CCGs)
Heroes of the Storm (MOBAs)
World of Warcraft (Everquest)
Overwatch (Team Fortress 2)
yup. good family game.
plays very much like a video version of a board game, where dice really do control your fate quite often. However, there are also strategies to be employed, and several different ways to win.
I can’t recall anything quite like it.
Not being a Pokehunter, I’ve gotten the impression the whole point of the app is to encourage walking (for the exercise aspect).
But that’s just my 3rd hand impression so don;t take it too seriously. I was amused to see a recent online headline that one side effect of Pokeman Go is a pandemic of sore legs. Seems like a response to the usual complaint about handheld games (by parents and oldsters) that these game apps only exercise thumbs. So they’ve come up with an app that requires walking to find the virtual creatures.
otherwise, nuthin2say
There really isn’t any justification for that much cynicism. This was not their first attempt at a WOW-based CCG, and they clearly took the lessons they learned from their first effort to tailor the experience into what is by all accounts a brilliantly executed casual card game. And far from usurping, they have invigorated the genre. Before Hearthstone, it was considered a niche genre — so much so that there was a collective groan when they announced it. Magic the Gathering had every chance to sew up the online market, but their online efforts were dismal in comparison. Now, since Hearthstone’s launch there have been all kinds of CCGs released, attempting to cash in on Hearthstone’s expose and success.
You also undervalue the amount of innovation and work that goes into tailoring a game like Hearthstone to find the right combination of mechanics and game play to make it easy to learn and fun to play. If it was easy, they wouldn’t have been the first to do it so successfully.
The one major criticism I have of the game is that the learning curve is too high once you leave the friendly confines of the tutorial and practice mode (both against the computer). It’s one thing to understand the basic mechanics of the game, it’s entirely another to put it all together and compete successfully against players who have been at it longer than you and have more of the cards than you. Both Casual Mode and Arena Mode can be brutal if you don’t know what you’re doing. The only reasonably safe haven is ranks 25-20 in Play Mode, but even there you often face opponents that are out of a new player’s league.
But if you persevere, and get over that initial hump, there’s a lot of fun to be had.
I got Hitman GO recently, and found it to be a very enjoyable little puzzle game. Definitely planning on getting Lara Croft GO when it becomes available on my tabletting device of choice. I have to admit, I thought that Pokémon Go would be something like those games, Turns out I was not right – seems more like Ingress. I wonder if the “Go” thing is related, or if it’s just a coincidence.
Hearthstone looks nice, but I was kind of heartbroken by the Magic The Gathering game, because it wouldn’t let you build your own deck. That pretty much killed my passion for non-solitaire card games on the computer.
Wait, no, I also quite like the Poker Night At The Inventory games. It’s mostly because of the incessant taunting from Max.
Reminds me a little of them my mom got heavily into Second Life. She’s a retired architect, so she loved the building elements, but of course, it’s a major eclectic social community.
The thing is, I was a huge FurryMUCKer back in the 90’s, which was a text-based version of Second Life. So it was fun listening to her talk to me about the current version of things I was yammering on about to her 20 years ago.
I’m pretty much a strict tabletop gamer, mainly RPGs and miniature wargames.. I stopped playing computer/console games in the late nineties before control pads became so complex that you need to grow three extra fingers to use them. That last game I recall playing on a regular basis was Activision’s Heavy Gear II. I tried to play WoW a few years back when it was still popular, but I got bored with it in the first hour.
Therefore I can’t say that Pokemon Go or Hearthstone have aroused my interest. That said, they just rolled out a mobile translation of the GW tabletop wargame Battlefleet Gothic that looks really good. That I might download.
@15
Overwatch and TF2 are only similar inasmuch as they’re Objective focused, team-based shooters. In practice, I find them to be fairly different in average game length and play style, and having played competitively in both, consider Overwatch to be far superior in competitive balance.
The other young person just got back from a Pokémon Go walk with quite a collection. Me, I am trying to figure out how the critters were distributed – a crew of Google Earth users could scatter them through towns outdoors, but I think some are inside buildings, like on cash registers.
#18
There have certainly been plenty of card games since Hearthstone, but it was by no means a stale genre beforehand. Might and Magic: Duel of Champions and (especially) Card Hunter being preeminent precursors to HS.
OK, I’m going to go on the record saying that the Pokemon Go concept is brilliant. The game itself so far seems to be a good base to build on, but the brilliance lies within. For example, if you come across Pokemon eggs you’ll have to walk, on average, 2 to 5 Km in order to get them to hatch. The more rare eggs will require more walking than that. It’s a game that makes people exercise just in the act of playing it.
Bonus: there’s a waterfall fountain at my office that is a Pokemon info center. Depending on the reset, I have at least one convenient source of Pokeballs. Caught a Pidgey by the fountain. :-)
I do wonder what’s going to happen as the high wears off – as people have noticed the battle system’s fairly rudimentary and holding a gym doesn’t really help you other than making it easier to hatch eggs. I think mostly the appeal is going to be in ‘catching ’em all’, as it seems pretty clear that the rarity of pokemon isn’t the same everywhere – thankfully, this is the thing the game does well.
I’ve played a fair bit of Ingress; I think Pokemon Go is the first game I’m aware of where user-submitted data from one game is used in another. Ingress is much more clunky – the only way you can interact with the game is through ‘portals’ and if you’re low level you can’t really participate in any of the highly trafficked areas, which means you don’t advance. Pokemon Go is a slighter game, but I think the game design is a bit better.
The question is what happens next. Niantic runs multiple Ingress events a year, and given how closely Pokemon Go is hewing to Ingress, it seems likely that’ll be the mechanism for distributing legendary Pokemon. The shocking success of the game might mean Niantic has some money to throw around to speed up development; trading and battling are things people clearly want, but they aren’t part of the minimum viable product.
Hey PZ, glad to hear you enjoyed Hearthstone!
Just a comment about Blizzard’s MO — and, disclosure, I work as a web developer at the Austin branch, so I’m not unbiased. I actually think it’s totally fair to say that Blizzard doesn’t invent game genres. In fact, I said something just like that when I interviewed two years ago, and I got the job. I think “add little to no innovation” is just a bit oversimplified. It takes a lot of design ingenuity to figure out what is essential to the gameplay, what’s missing, and what would improve on the predecessors.
I would say that one of Blizzard’s greatest strength is making a genre accessible to beginners and enjoyable to all skill levels. I was familiar with collectible card games before Hearthstone, but I was never really interested. The Hearthstone tutorial hooked me. I heard that when Magic The Gathering made an attempt at an online game, it did poorly for a number of reasons. The main thing HS had going for it was that it was built on the ground up as an online game, so the rules could iron out features of MTG that work properly in a real life setting but are clunky online.
For instance, in MTG there are moves that you can play to interrupt your opponent’s turn while he plays cards, but Hearthstone is designed to handle asynchronous interactions. So each player has to run through his entire turn before passing on, but there are card mechanics that automatically trigger on some conditions. And players don’t have to figure out on the fly which of their cards can affect the game, and there are random events that can be resolved with no possibility of cheating.
My point being that it’s easy to look at a game like Hearthstone and say “Oh, that’s the same as game Y,” while missing exactly what it is about Hearthstone to get and keep a huge following almost 20 years after MTG started dominating that genre.
Yeah, what most impressed me about Hearthstone is that I started it up totally cold — as someone who didn’t play CCGs, had no idea how it worked, and didn’t read any instructions at all — and it had me playing in no time at all, and grasping how the game worked.
Now if only I knew how to implement that kind of pedagogy in cell biology and genetics…
3. …Not available in Europe yet. So unfair. :'(
You can still get it through apkmirror.com (only for Android though). It`s not officially available in Canada either, but I still got it, and there are plenty of Pokemon, gyms, and other stuff kicking around our streets already…
I just ran across this nice explanation of Pokémon Go:
http://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12129162/pokemon-go-android-ios-game
Now I’ll have to try it out.