Hello, Heroes!
Welcome to the very first set of "State of the Game" review for Fable Fortune! For anyone who doesn’t know yet, my name is Tom “Wimbles” Wimbush and I’m the Lead Designer of Fable Fortune from Mediatonic. This state of the game review is an experimental initiative from the design team aimed at communicating what is currently on our radar in terms of game balance and card design. We hope that it will provide some insight into what we’re exploring and a look ahead to what changes you might be seeing at some point in the future.
First, a disclaimer: everything here is subject to change, and absolutely nothing said here should be seen as a firm promise that something will be changed. These are just our current thoughts on a wide range of topics so that you guys can get a rough sense of what our priorities are based on internal playtesting, community feedback and player analytics. However, we are hoping to address some of these topics as part of our Early Access update.
These reviews also won’t touch on upcoming features; you can check out the Sneak Peeks to see what new features we’re currently working on. These reviews are strictly about ongoing work on card design and balance.
Buckle in. It’s going to be a long one.
Board Wipes
We know that this has been a hot topic in the community lately, though it’s been a talking point internally for far longer. Board wipes (effects that deal damage to multiple units) that only affect your opponent’s board, like Surge of Fangs and Leeching Swarm, are extremely powerful because they allow you to do two things very well: lose less and win more.
Preventing yourself from losing, or ‘losing less’, is an essential tool for any card game (or competitive game in general) as it stops you being powerless once your opponent has the advantage. This is what two-sided board wipes that affect ALL units, like Stench of Death, are good for: resetting the board state and allowing you to start making a comeback in a game that you were losing.
Pressing your advantage, or ‘winning more’, is key to closing out a match before your opponent can swing the game back in their favour. These effects are also important to have in a card game that wants to foster a diverse range of decks (like us!). However, one-sided board wipes like Surge of Fangs and Leeching Swarm allow you to win more while also serving as an excellent tool for making you lose less. This means that there is basically no reason to not include them in your deck right now. We’re aware, and we’re looking into it.
Fabled Cards
I mentioned this in the last set of patch notes, but we’re currently exploring some changes to many of our Fabled cards. Our Hero-specific Fabled cards (Reaver, Leech, Inga, etc) should feel like powerful units that are closely matched to that Hero’s playstyle and that you want to include in many of that Hero’s decks. Conversely, neutral Fabled cards (Nostro, The Guildmaster, etc) should be cool, unique cards that you want to build a particular deck around.
Currently many of our neutral Fabled cards are too consistently powerful and too easily slot into too many decks. This skews the game too much in favour of players who own a lot of Fabled cards and therefore makes the game less fun for newer players with smaller collections. On the flip side, many of the Hero-specific Fabled cards are too niche and/or not powerful enough to warrant being played in many decks. This means that getting a Hero’s Fabled card is less exciting than getting many of the neutral Fabled card.
Neither of these things are good for the game, and we’re investigating how we could improve them.
Mythic Cards
Similar to Fabled cards, Mythic cards should fulfill a similar role to neutral Fabled cards, in that they should be cool, unique effects that you want to build a deck around. Some of our Mythic cards aren’t quite there yet, so we’re exploring some alternative designs for them so that they can hit that target.
Quest Balance
The balance of the Quests within each location is also in need of some tuning. For example, the current values for each Quest objective mean that picking the Gold spending Quest in the Crucible is by far the most attractive option. This is leading to problems with Quest diversity, where players are trending towards picking only one of the three Quests in each location because some are too hard to complete in a reasonable time-frame. This isn’t our intention at all, and we’ll be exploring some options for how this might be improved.
Quest Rewards
Completing your Quest and earning a reward should be an awesome moment during a match. Right now, the Quest rewards on offer are a bit flat and uninspiring, which is really taking away from the satisfying moment that we’re trying to create. We have a few ideas for how we could revamp these rewards to be both more exciting and more interesting from a deck-building and gameplay perspective that we’re in the early stages of playtesting, but this may take some time to refine.
Hero Powers
The way that you improve your Hero Power by completing Quests has a few distinct issues.
Firstly, not all Hero Powers are created equal. Offenders like the Good Shapeshifter, Good Prophet and (to a lesser extent) the Evil Alchemist are stronger or more consistent than many of the other Hero Powers. For example, there is rarely a reason to choose to go Evil when playing as Prophet because of the overall strength of the Good Hero Power, which fundamentally works against our goal of wanting to make each Quest completion offer you a meaningful choice.
Secondly, the nature of each Hero Power’s scaling means that some tend to perform better in the early or late game, making the choice less meaningful as one option tends to outweigh the other depending on how late in the game it is. When combined with the uneven power levels of some of the Hero Powers, this means that many games will play out the same way with players selecting the same Good/Evil choices over and over again.
Finally, the granular way in which the Hero Powers get stronger with each Quest completion makes them harder for new players to understand and hard to balance for us as a design team.
As I hope you guys can appreciate, there are pretty complex issues that will take a lot of work to solve, but we are looking into it.
First Player Advantage
Currently, players who go first have too much of an advantage in terms of overall tempo (presence on the board; ability to dictate action in the game), and consequently have a higher win rate than players who go second. We’re in the very early stages of looking at the strength of Trophy cards to see if we can address this balance in this way, or if it will require a deeper change.
Morality Cards
Morality cards, like the Hero-specific Fabled cards, are often too niche or not powerful enough to warrant being included in a deck. This is a real shame, as we think their transforming nature is really exciting and taps into the meaningful choices that define the Fable franchise. There are a whole heap of redesigns that we’re currently iterating on so that we can ensure that Morality cards are appealing and hit an appropriate power level.
Hollow Men, Hobbes & Bandits
All of these races are currently lacking a strong identity, which is reflected in the lack of Hollow Man and Hobbe decks currently being played. Bandits are a popular deck choice, but only because they have some particularly powerful cards and not because they promote interesting and synergistic gameplay.
We have some large-scale changes to Hollow Men and Hobbes that we’re currently playtesting to make sure that they feel like the creatures that you know and love while also serving as the basis for some new and interesting decks in their own right. Bandits will get a similar treatment at some point, but as they are currently seeing play we’re happy to leave them as they are right now and then revisit them at a later date.
Heroes
Shapeshifter
Ah, Crimson. You sure do like killing things.
The Shapeshifter’s strength right now is her ability to kill her opponent’s units. All of them. All the time. This harkens back to the control decks from Magic: The Gathering’s past, where you were able to just sit back and counter all of your opponent’s cards. Fun to play, perhaps, but oppressively powerful and not exactly fun to play against.
We want Crimson to be actively interacting with the board by playing units of her own and augmenting them with a range of interesting spells. Dealing damage and killing units should definitely be her speciality, but that shouldn’t be the only thing that she’s good at, and she shouldn’t be able to rely on it to the exclusion of everything else. We’re currently redesigning and tweaking many of her cards to help broaden her playstyle and make her play in a more fun and interactive way.
Prophet
The Prophet suffers from similar problems to the Shapeshifter, in that he has one viable playstyle that revolves almost exclusively around healing and using removal spells. In situations where healing isn’t useful, the Prophet tends to fare badly, and many of his units aren’t strong enough to compete against the various neutral choices that are available. We’re currently looking into revamping many of his units and updating his spells to help give him some new design space to tap into.
Knight
The Knight is also quite limited in terms of his strategic diversity. Peasant-based strategies don’t have quite enough support right now to be competitive, and the cards that support Peasants have very little to offer a more mid-range or controlling style of deck. The end result is that the Knight is leaning quite heavily on his powerful midrange cards and many of his other cards don’t see any play. Not exactly optimal, so we’re retooling some of his cards to fit more easily into a wider range of decks.
Merchant
The Merchant is a hard Hero to build decks around, but internally we have a few Merchant decks that perform quite well. We’re excited to see you guys starting to pick these up. In some configurations these can even be too hard to handle if they get off to a dream start, so that’s something we’re still keeping an eye on.
We’re also looking at making some adjustments to the Merchant’s units to make them fit more easily into different decks, and ensuring that he has more options to answer the strong early game cards available to the other Heroes.
Alchemist
The Alchemist is suffering from a combination of a lack of strong individual units and few ways to claw back tempo once she has lost it, meaning that her powerful buff cards often rot in her hand without a good target. We’re focusing our efforts on these two areas and have some early ideas on how we could shore them up to bring her more in line with the other Heroes in terms of power level.
Gravedigger
The Gravedigger has proven to be surprisingly strong, but we’re happy with her overall direction. Depending on how some other changes pan out, she may need more support (particularly for her more aggressive decks) but I don’t anticipate needing any large scale changes at this point.
That’s all for this state of the game review. As I said at the beginning, this is primarily a way for us to share our thought process and current priorities with you all, and should not be seen as a roadmap of exactly what’s going to happen over the coming weeks and months as it’s all subject to change.
It’s a pretty extensive list and I’d love to hear what you guys think about it all, so feel free to sound off in the comments with your thoughts. Also, please do keep your feedback coming. We find your insights a really valuable part of our design process. Ultimately we want to make sure that you’re having as much as fun as possible while playing the game, and letting us know what you think is the best way that you can help us to achieve that.
Happy chicken chasing!
- Tom “Wimbles” Wimbush, Lead Designer (Mediatonic)