Weekly News Update- April 9th, 2019 A Feast For Trolls Live!

09 Apr 2019Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

A star shines upon the hour of our meeting!

A Feast For Trolls is available today, free to all players!

As we mentioned last week, A Feast For Trolls is available today. Can you avoid the cook pot in this free new Encounter?

The Trolls are Hungry—And You’re on the Menu…

You don't have to do anything to get this new encounter- just load up the game and go to the play menu. A Feast For Trolls is fully playable in both single and co-op play modes.

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Just a reminder that Encounters are typically more challenging than regular quests, but free for all players.

Patch Notes and Fixes

We've made a few updates to the game along with the release of A Feast For Trolls to improve game play. You can check out the exact patch notes here.

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Upcoming Network Fixes
In addition to these fixes, we took a deeper look at network code based on some recent player reported issues. We've found a few network code issues that we will be updating in the coming days that will improve reconnect behavior and reduce disconnects in general.

Update Preview — Save Feature

This week, as part of our ongoing news updates on our major upcoming game update, we focus on our new save game feature. As always, be aware that these new features are works in progress, and likely will change before we release them.

One of the nice things that digital card games bring you is that you don't have to spend time worrying about board setup and gathering the proper cards in the proper place when you play. That way you can jump right into the action without worrying if you set things up properly or having to worry about cleanup after you play.

Another nice aspect of digital games is speed of play. Since you don't have to execute play manually, you can focus on just playing and have the action occur automatically based on your play decisions.

One of the things we've found with The Lord of the Rings: Living Card Game is that due to the complexity of the decision making, playing a quest can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more for those players who agonize over every action. In multiplayer, this is exacerbated by players discussing courses of action and deciding the best way to move forward. While we are seeing shorter completions done in twenty minutes, some of you take up to 2 hours to complete a quest.

For this reason, it became pretty quickly apparent that we would want a save game feature. However, adding a save game wasn't as cut and dried as it first appeared. There were several tricky design issues that needed to be considered and resolved.

Due to the game being card based, we had to make a several critical decisions on how we wanted to go about implementing a saved game system. In multiplayer, these decisions get even more complex since we're juggling two players, their own deck state, board states, and Sauron's deck state. If you are in a saved state, your deck also cannot be altered, as you have played out certain cards in your deck at the time of the save. This meant some juggling of complex issues without breaking the game itself.

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Checkpoint Based System
One of the things we decided early on was that the system would be automatic and save your game after each completed location. We wanted to keep the focus session based rather than creating an old school system where players have to consciously manage their saves as they play or promote the kind of play where you save your game literally after every round draw and simply quit and reboot if a single action doesn't go your way. We felt that would not be a good direction for game play.

When our save game feature goes live, the game will automatically create a save game checkpoint after you complete every location. This means that if you load up your game again, it will place you at the start of the last incomplete location where you left the game. If you don't like how you did in a single round and want to restart, or you disconnect for some reason, you will need to start that location over.

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Single Player
Save Games will vary somewhat between single and multiplayer games. For single player, you will automatically create one save game per quest played. If you leave a quest, and return to the game, you can pick that quest again, and start at the last incomplete location where you left off. Please note that the deck you used in that quest will be locked until you complete the quest since you have that deck committed to that quest. You can still play with that deck in other quests, but you cannot edit it until you resolve the save game (by completing the quest or deleting the saved game).