Hi there, I’m ModusPwnenz from the design team at Shiny Shoe here to share some design insights behind the Pyre Hearts; a new addition to Monster Train 2!
Before each run while choosing your Clans there is a new option to swap your Pyre Heart as well. The idea behind the swappable Pyre Hearts was similar to the trinkets from Inkbound; have some fun new things to unlock that let you customize your run to fit your preferred playstyle or just your mood at the time. Whether you want to focus more on playing unit cards, slinging spells, making money, adding more randomness, or setting up a high impact turn, there are Pyre Hearts that will help you achieve these dreams.
Without giving away too many secrets, let’s take a look at some of the Pyre Hearts: Bogwurm’s Growth and Aquath’s Reservation.
Bogwurm’s Growth is great for players that want to fill up their train with the largest menagerie possible as each victory increases the floor space on your train. However, the goal is still to embrace the randomness that makes rogue games so replayable as the floors that grow in size will be different every run. As you can tell from the name, each of the Pyre Hearts is inspired by a Titan and their powers. Bogwurm’s tremendous size led to the idea of an uncontrollable evergrowing Train passively getting larger over time.
Aquath’s Reservation on the other hand is more focused on setting up a huge impact turn and embracing the cerebral nature of Aquath. This Pyre Heart has an ability that can be used once per battle to generate a bunch of Ember which then in turn can cheat out a high cost card or fuel an “X” charged spell. This also demonstrates some of the differences in how the Hearts can be used to either support you in a passive style like Bogwurm or a single high impact player choice like Aquath. One of the larger changes we made early on to Aquath’s Reservation was to turn it into an active ability. The earliest version simply gave a passive bonus to how much Ember could be held between turns but the switch to the active ability made much more sense with fitting the theme and also utilizing the new unit ability system in a fun way.
While the added changes can be exciting and run warping we know that some players like the classic experience. To accommodate this, we wanted to make sure that the default Pyre Heart is viable, and thus need a way to balance around that. In this case, and to help balance the other Hearts in general, we tune the attack and health values of each Heart differently depending on what it brings to the Train. As the default Proto Heartcage has no extra powers, it is extremely durable naturally, while on the other hand a Pyre Heart like Malicka’s Shifting Pyre is much lower due to the strength you can gain from all the random upgrades it imparts.
There are thirteen Pyre Hearts in total with some of the endgame ones having truly run warping properties for those that want to take it to the next level. We hope you have fun unlocking them, trying them out, and using them to break the game in new and exciting ways when Monster Train 2 comes out later this year!
If you would like to see these Pyre hearts (and more), join us for a special stream on March 28th, 12:00 PM PST here.
Thank you so much for reading and for playing Monster Train 2!